For my research method of practice I decided to focus on ethnographic research by conducting an interview. The interview that I conducted was with a young girl that i baby sit who recently just had a birthday. The conversation was very casual and what I had hoped to gain from this interview was how children perceive aging and even more specifically how children feel about getting older. The young girl that I interviewed had recently just turned 11 years old and had very little to say on how she felt about actually turning 11 during our conversation. Instead she was much more interested in the concrete artifacts of a tradition birthday party. She could not wait to show me all of the presents she had received and in particular she could not stop speaking about the new record player her dad had gotten her and her new found love for the infamous Beatles. She spoke of these things because they were of value to her and contributed in some way to her own life and they were important to her own experience of her birthday. She did not care much about the actual age that she turned. She was not affected by turning 11 instead she was focused on the gifts she received. This to me is very interesting because the truth of the matter is once adults reach a certain age they dread birthdays! No longer is their focus placed on the gifts they will receive but they begin to focus solely on age, and the age that they are turning, it consumes them. But for this young girl she could care less about aging mainly because it is not relevant to her. At this particular point in her life she may not see how age affects her but she does note how her gifts make her feel.

I thought this method of practice for the most part was pretty easy and simple to participate in because the results were easily obtainable. There was not much wait time that had to happen to get results or some sort of conclusive outcome. The results did not go as expected, I was expecting to find out more on how children felt about turning a certain age I thought that there would be a lot of aging that a child might want to say on particular how it effects their individual lives. I would utilize this method of research when conducting my own personal research because like I previous stated it is an easy way to access information quickly and efficiently it also leads to quicker access to data and it’s very personal.