"I do apologise we appear to be having some technical difficulties"

 This is a phrase that every performer, company and patron of the theatre hates to hear but inevitably will at some point during their lives... there also could not be a more fitting phrase to describe my most recent interviews. 

I had three interviews scheduled this week - one on Tuesday, one Thursday and one Friday and the technology gods have NOT been on my side... My first interview was scheduled to be at 7am my time on Tuesday but ended up being postponed to Thursday due to the wifi being down at my participant's work place, my cat then proceeded to launch my external hard-drive off my bed after my second interview on Thursday after which for some reason it would not "mount" to my laptop. I am recording my meetings directly to the external hard-drive before uploading them to the middlesex one-drive since I have no storage on my laptop and my phone and this happened before I'd had chance to upload them. Luckily after I faffed about with it for a bit and, unplugged/replugged it what seemed like a million times, it started working again and I immediately uploaded my recordings to the one-drive

Friday morning was when technological chaos really descended upon me. My interview, again scheduled for 7am my time was delayed by 20 minutes as my participant got held up at work. When we finally began the call, 10 minutes in my laptop crashed and would not turn back on (it was fully charged and plugged in) so I had to complete the meeting on my phone. I managed to record the second part of the meeting to my phone but since my laptop crashed before the recording had been converted and saved to my hard-drive I lost the first 10 minutes of the interview. I'm sure you can imagine my frustration at this which of course was heightened further by the fact I had been up since 5:45 and I am NOT a morning person. 

Technical difficulties aside I am actually really enjoying the interview process. Having re-listened to my first interview I have made some changes to the questions I am asking and the way in which I ask them. I noticed that even though I was asking open ended questions I tended to follow the question with examples which I fear could have influenced my first participants thinking and responses so I have made an effort in the more recent ones to avoid doing that and if an example is needed to aid the participants understanding of the question I am making sure to offer more than one opinion. 

I have now interviewed participants in each of the three different areas of my inquiry (dancers, directors/teachers, clinical professionals) and it is really interesting to see the similarities and differences between each perspective. One key theme that seems to have come up in all of my interviews so far is how the nature of ballet has changed quite drastically over the last few decades in terms of athleticism and how that is impacting the physiological demand on dancers and the need for more invasive injury prevention techniques. Other key themes that have been coming up are the difference between conscious and sub-conscious injury prevention, the importance of early education in injury prevention and the importance of having a collaborative approach to injury prevention between dancers and their directors/wellbeing teams.

It has been an interesting process so far and I am excited to continue my data collection and explore these areas further - hopefully with less technical challenges x