The Description and Analysis of the Interview (Other (Not Listed) Sample)

Description of the Interview
The woman I chose to interview is my grandmother Rita W., a mother of five children who worked for the American Airlines corporate office in the HR department. My grandmother made a perfect choice since we differ in many different ways, particularly in her kind of upbringing. Due to the different periods and environments of growing up, the societal issues surrounding her upbringing, workforce experiences, thoughts, and ideas significantly differ from mine. Besides exploring her childhood experiences, I particularly wish to enquire how she home responsibilities as a wife with five children while working full-time at the airline's corporate office. The interview took place on Sunday last week and was mainly conducted through face-to-face conversations at my grandmother's apartment in Los Angeles. To make the interview valuable, I developed questions that explored various topics concerning women's studies, including parenting/womanhood, gender roles, colorism, and how women maneuver through the male-dominant workplace and women's access to education. Interestingly, having been born in 1954, my grandmother has worked for American Airlines in HR since she was 22 and had to deal with various issues related to women's suffrage at the workplace, including pay inequality, racism, promotion injustices, and gender inequality among others. Partly due to our close bond and trust, the interview process was easy as my grandmother was very open in sharing in detail every information I inquired from her.
Analysis of the Interview
The first part of the interview focused on the prevalent women's inequality regarding gender roles. Being born in the 1950s, when the world was still behind in realizing gender equality, my grandmother, Rita, faced significant gender role inequality. Notably, Rita was the first born in her family with two brothers and three sisters. Since she was the elder child of the family, she often had to take up the responsibilities of her parents when they were not around, including taking care of her siblings and performing various house chores. Responding to the nature of domestic duties during her childhood, Rita observed, "Girls were expected to perform almost all house chores while boys would get away with doing almost nothing." She added, "except for the rare slashing of the compound and washing dad's car, my younger brothers rarely performed the common house chores and my parents were comfortable with it." Hence, grandma carried the burden of family upkeep as she performed various house duties, including cleaning the house and compound, washing clothes, and cooking. In Pat Mainardi’s article, Politics of Housework, the husband considered buying groceries, cooking meals, doing laundry, and washing dishes and pots as dirty chores and became more repulsed when he contemplated these chores (Mainardi, 1970). Besides, the husband says, "I do not mind sharing the work, but you have to show me how to do it," indicating that women have been historically disadvantaged regarding everyday house chores.