student reflections: Tennessee Immigrants and Criminal Justice

McKenna Cox, Kimberly Pride, and Michael Wright

Before we begin our reflections, we thought readers might want to know a little more about us. This was a research project, after all, and to understand research, you need to understand the researchers. While objectivity was the goal of our project, absolute objectivity is rarely possible in any endeavor, especially when researching human behavior. So for more information about us, click on McKenna Cox , Kimberly Pride , and Michael Wright .

Our reflections below are divided into three main sections:

A. Difficulties and frustrations
B. An unexpected high point
C. Overall reflections from individual team members

A. Difficulties and frustrations

1. Getting interviews
As one of us remarked in a report to Professor Ansley, “By far the single largest frustration working on an interview-based project is scheduling interviews.” (Teacher comment on trouble getting through) Here are some observations several of us made about this aspect of our work:

It is amazing how many people just do not return telephone calls. For me, the frustration was that I was constantly trying to walk the line between being persistent and telephone harassment. I know that the others in my group had the same unpleasant experience.

* * *

Conducting interviews for this project was rather straightforward, given the latitude we had with the questioning. Arranging interviews was a different story. In general, problems with arranging interviews with those that were willing to be interviewed originated not in their particular difficult schedules but in the relatively short period of time a semester allowed us as students to pursue the interviews. For instance, a local minister I contacted seemed very willing to set up an interview. However, it only took a couple of school deadlines and a few conflicts with work on my part and a trip to Venezuela on his part to delay a meeting time beyond the scope of our project.

* * *

Getting people to return phone calls is surprisingly difficult! We tried leaving messages describing our project, and also leaving those just saying we were law students. It gets very frustrating to try to make contact with someone you really want to talk to and get no response or a phone call weeks later.

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