June 9, 2009: A Typical Day

7:45 am:
I wake up to my alarm (though I’ve probably woken up at 5:30 to the call to prayer, which is like a reminder that I only have a few more hours to sleep). It has a beautiful and eerie sound and is vaguely comforting. Israr and I eat a breakfast of tea and either eggs and pita or melon or labneh (yogurt), tomato and pita. We drive from our apartment in Al-Rabieh through 6th circle and around 7th circle (there’s probably a faster way to get to work, but this one works so far) to Al-Wakalat Street, where we head into the office, located in a building to the left of GAP and to the right of Starbucks. This area, Swefiyeh is a spendy neighborhood with a beautiful cobblestone mall area.

9:00am:
Start work at the office: Return emails. Hopefully potential interview subjects have responded positively. Usually I return about 6-10 such emails each morning. Call new contacts to set up interview times. Review our interview questions, so see if we want to make any changes according to how the previous day’s interviews went.

10:40am:
Head to first interview… this can take anywhere from one hour to three depending on how much time the subject has—and how talkative he or she is. The trend in this first week seems to be towards the latter. I think 4 out of the 5 interviews we’ve conducted so far have taken between two and three hours.

12:30pm: (assuming the interview finished on time)
Head to grab a quick lunch and back to the office to organize notes, return more emails and perhaps follow up on some calls. Maybe a short meeting with our supervisor to update her on what we got out of the interview.

2:00pm:
Head out to interview number two. It could be anywhere from a five minute drive to a twenty minute drive. And there’s the added factor of getting lost. Though generally nothing is much farther than 25 minutes away in Amman at least to my knowledge. For a city of two million (or so I’ve been told, though figures seem to vary) it’s not all that big in space.

4:00pm:
Head back to the office to organize our contact lists and mark off our interview subjects. Hopefully some time to start typing interview notes.

6:00pm onwards:
Head to the gym or meet up with friends for dinner or other Amman activities (last night we went to a play in a nearby town). Recently, we’ve found we need to spend a few hours each night typing our interview notes because we don’t have time during the day at the office with the scheduling of our interviews, so that’s my activity from 9pm to midnight. We’ve made some nice homemade dinners to save money and relax. I try to find time to study my Arabic but time seems somewhat limited.

So that’s the general schedule. I hadn’t really truly realized how long interviews would take and how much it would take out of you. It’s been a challenge but we’re getting the hang of it. The notes typing is less fun. And laborious. I’ve filled an entire notebook so far. I’m guessing I’ll go through one a week. That a lot of notes. But this is my sneak peek into the world of primary research. And my conclusion: it is a lot of work!