I will probably be doing a majority of my interviews over the phone. In this age of mobile telephones, I wasn’t sure exactly how this was going to work, mostly because I have discovered that T-Mobile’s signal is terrible at my house, particularly in my bedroom at my desk. So doing them that way is a dicey proposition. Also, I really don’t know how recording cell phone calls works.

A Google search turns up a couple of options. First, you can pay a service to record your conversation for you. It basically is a three-way call between you, the person you are talking to, and a recorder that is on the site of whatever company you are using. You can then either retrieve the conversation over the phone, or you can download the .wav file. It sounds like a pretty good system, right? WRONG! 250 minutes for 100 bucks! With interviews expected to run 1 – 1.5 hours, that’s basically a hundred bucks for every two interviews. Out. Then there is a machine that you can hook up your cell phone that will record your phone conversations. It also doubles as a normal digital voice recorder, which would be super handy. but again, you run into price tag problems, as the cheapest model goes for 216 bones. Out. There’s also the option of reestablishing the landline. Like most people, we got rid of ours once everyone in the house was equipped with a cell phone. And last I remember, dealing with the phone company was a big hassle. On top of that, I’d still have to find a digital recorder that I could somehow hook up to the phone. With phone startup fees, long distance charges, and the recorder, I’d say we’re still looking at about 300 dollars total. So what am I going to do?

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As I alluded to in the previous post, the latest bulletin board posting blitz has been quite successful so far. I’ve gotten at least a dozen people to email me back and we are on our way to getting an honest to goodness interview schedule going. Additionally, most of the people have been good about forwarding my request for interviewees to other people and to other mailing lists. In fact, the nice folks at Baseball Think Factory put up the announcement in one of their news blogs!  BTW, if you click on over you will find an amusing exchange in the comments section.  As if getting interview subjects wasn’t enough, most of the people have had kind words of encouragement for my research.  They’ve also directed me to a lot of good advice about conducting my research and resources that will be helpful in my research, i.e. the previous post on the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective was a result of one of these people sending me the link thinking it would be helpful.  It’s been a bit humbling actually.  I mean, I’m feel pretty knowledgeable about Sabermetrics, but I think pedagogically, we as researchers, often forget that we don’t nearly as much about the things we are studying, as the actual people we are studying.  I must say, I’m very encouraged by all of this.  Like most grad students, I’m a bit jaded and cynical about the nature of humans, but the response that I have gotten makes me hopeful that it is worthwhile to study other human beings.

Anyways, now I need to get to the business of getting things shored up for all of these interviews coming up this summer.  So, without further ado, here is to do list #2.

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