Cinnabar and Alabaster

she describes her tentative intentions for doing some interviewing, for a focus & approach for her topic—"i have a few questions i'd like to run by you, actually," she says in reference to the mention of interviews." "my friends pay more attention to late-night tv than the news as sources of information—i'm going to try to find literature on this."
dave re-states his understanding of her topic & asks her to relay her major claim & intentions.
she explains that she heard a new version of a media story she was relatively familiar with from a professor whose expertise she trusted, which led her to wondering what the media wasn't disclosing.
dave re-states again: "so you experienced a kind of disconnect. seems to fit in with the gist of the course—the influence of media on popular opinion." her interests so far seem to point in two directions, one toward an interest in finding out what's really going on in the story she's researching, and another in finding out where her peers actually get their impressions of & understanding of this & other current events. it seems a little overwhelming, & she's waffling.
dave encourages her to "[not] throw out a topic too soon until you've talked to people" & asks her about her plans to do some interviewing.
she explains her plan for sending out a series of successive e-mails with only a few questions in each one, because she knows when she gets surveys from people if they have a lot of questions she won't answer them; the sample she's considering is about 10 of her friends in california.
"do you have a hypothesis in mind for what you expect to find," he asks, & she explains the media version of the story she thinks everyone has heard. "& what might you do with these pieces of research," he asks again, to get her thinking; she responds by sketching out an array of things she's seen directly or found reference to in other places.
"do you have a sense of whether you'll be able to get archives of shows?" when she says she really doesn't know, he rolls over to the computer, talking halfway to himself and halfway to her about what materials he thinks might be available through communication studies or the library's website. he finds her a link to the "archive of television news," but nothing about late night programming. "know anyone who tapes them? i don't know anything about how tivo works—"
she doesn't know anyone who tapes the shows, & explains that you still have to plan ahead of time to record things on tivo, so that won't work either, & they start talking instead about how she can use interviews to find out from people who do watch the shows what impressions they got from watching them, even if she can't get ahold of the shows to watch them herself—"quiz the people who said they got their information here—what facts seem to be the most memorable? what other media do they consume?
"is that sensible," he asks her, when they've gotten a handful of possibilities out there: "does it make sense?"
"yeah."
"are you feeling any better about it?"
"no." they both grin when she says this, she a little sheepishly, him warmly; he's got almost a half hour left and a wealth of good ideas.
"what are you worried about?"
she says mostly she's having trouble finding "scholarly literature," and she's concerned about the lack; he suggests some places she can look for more support, but reassures her that the few more scholarly sources she has, combined with the more popular accounts fitting to her subject that she's already working with sound pretty good to him!
"once i get researching!" she adds, and then "oh—my questions!" pulls out a typed list of potential interview questions to hand to him. "i was just wondering if you could add anything—or take away their bias."
dave reads the questions aloud (another thing i need to get better at doing) and reacts to each, letting her know which ones look clear to him, which ones he's kind of guessing at & that she thus needs to further refine. "this is really the hinge question that lets you move from these general questions to this more recent phenomenon," he says, identifying a rhetorical shift she probably doesn't notice herself making in the middle of the page. he takes a really in-depth look at the content and implications of her questions, pointing out what seems to be missing and that there's a discrepancy in focus—the opinion questions seem more centered around the right-to-life debate while the others are more about the media, and either set could easily be branched in either direction, but she needs to decide exactly how she wants to structure the conversations and her findings. when she agrees that he's making sense, he moves on to making some suggestions about how she arranges the questions, to talking with her about the pros & cons of interviewing via different media—phone calls instead of e-mail force you to be more structured, he pointed out, and always remind whomever you're interviewing how much time or how many questions is/are left—"it lets them know they're near the end & makes them more likely to give you good answers."
"okay, i guess that's it," she says. "i need to figure all this out soon, because they're going to forget about the [current media firestorm] case."
dave reminds her she needs a detailed proposal plan for tuesday—"how do you plan on presenting all this?" he says it's something he's planned on asking everyone, and sounds to me as if he's both letting her know he's not directing the question only at her and reminding himself.