Interview Paper

I have decided to do my interview paper on my mother in law because she grew up in Colorado and California and had a unique childhood growing up. My mother in law is 59 years old, Caucasian, Born in Arvada, Colorado. She has 5 brothers and 3 sisters and is a widow with two daughters. I believe she is eligible for this interview paper based off of the information I knew about her and the information I gathered from my wife as well. I decided on six questions that I felt would give me the best understanding in which would address both micro and macrosystem factors.
Question #1: When you were growing up what was the parenting practices that your family had?
If I or one of my siblings had done something wrong, we were either told to stand in a corner for a specific amount of time, made to go without eating dinner, or a certain privilege was taken away from us. Sometimes we were spanked in cases where one of us did something really bad. If we used bad language, we would have our mouths washed out with soap. My mother would always pray for us before we would head off to school and coming from a large family we all had specific chores to do around the house.
Question #2: When you were being raised as a child what was the economic conditions like?
From what I remember, the economy seemed to be pretty good. Telling the gas station attendant you wanted a couple dollars’ worth of regular unleaded gasoline would pretty much fill the entire gas tank. I believe regular unleaded gasoline was about twenty nine cents a gallon when I was a child. Me and my siblings always had plenty of food to eat and always had proper clothing for winter and summer seasons.
Question #3: When you were growing up what was your neighborhood like?
Our neighborhood was pretty good, no major crimes or anything like that like police car sirens going off all the time. We lived in a rural area in little country type towns when I was growing up. Most of the towns we lived in probably had less than twenty thousand people as a population. Most of the houses it would take a 5-10 minute walk to get to the next house. Most of the houses in my neighborhood were very spread out over more than an acre.
Question #4: Did you attend any type of religious activities’ when growing up? If yes, what type? If no, why?
Up until I was nine years old, we attended catechism. After that we stopped going to church for quite some time until I went to a Baptist church on my own as a teenager. My parents weren’t very involved in any type of religious activities by choice. They just chose not to attend any type of church services.
Question #5: What was your interactions between your teachers and yourself when growing up?
Well, as an example I was on the honor roll in seventh grade and once again when I was a teenager. I enjoyed school and loved my seventh and eighth grade teacher. Her name was Mrs. Thapp and was mainly an English teacher. She would read aloud books for us in class and that’s probably what got me into reading as much as I do now. I probably read a book a week because I enjoy reading so much.
Question #6: What was your relationship with your family, peers and other children like when you were growing up?
I pretty much stuck to myself, I guess you could say I was mostly a loner. I kept to myself most of the time at school. I had one good friend from grade school all throughout high school as we are still in contact today. I was my mother’s live-in housekeeper and babysitter. My father was almost always working or when he was at home he would be working out in his vegetable garden. He drove trucks so he would be gone for weeks at a time and then home for a week or so.
My experience from the interview with my mother in law was very informative and I found out that her upbringing was vastly different from my own parent’s style which was more authoritarian and authoritative parenting. My parents started out the same is my mother in law which was authoritarian with strict guidelines to follow and failure to follow the rules would result in punishment. As I got older my parents moved to a more authoritative parenting style.
My mother in law brought up the fact that she would have her mouth washed with soap and spanked which coming from an authoritarian parent could have caused her and her brothers and sisters likelier to be moody, anxious and a follower. I grew up in a fairly large city that was surrounded by technology growing up while my mother in law lived in a more rural setting. I believe that from the questions I asked my mother in law she had a lower context macrosystem worldview where I was the opposite growing up and was more of a high context macrosystem worldview.
I learned that coming from a rural setting doesn’t necessarily mean a person is going to be in a high context type of macrosystem because from the rest of her answers to my questions it shows that she would most likely fall in the lower context macrosystem. I didn’t realize that coming from such a large family that she mostly kept to herself. I couldn’t imagine being from that large of a family and being able to find any type of time for just myself. On the other hand I grew up without siblings and feel that I am more of a leader than follower which would place my parents on the authoritative style of parenting. Because my parents were authoritative I feel that a grew up happier, motivated, responsible and good at problem solving more than others. The one thing that I think both my mother in law and I have in common is the fact that we didn’t apply ourselves in school to get excellent grades. It wasn’t something I changed about myself until I started going to college and then set out to get the best grades possible. I have been on the President’s list 3 times and the Dean’s list two times.