- How much hours of sleep did you get last night? What about in average?
Like 9 hours.
- Are you an early bird or a night owl? Has your responsibility in life forced you to become one or the other?
I’m definitely a night owl because of my roommates; they sleep very late. So I’m kind of forced to do so. Sometimes I have to finish my homework.
- Have you experienced any difficulties in the past due to a lack of sleep? How does it affect your work performance?
Very much, because I have to sleep like 10 hours to be actually fully awake; I sleep a lot. That affects my work performance.
- Do you know when the daylight saving time starts and ends, and what happens during the time of change?
Yeah. For summer time, I lose one hour of sleep.
- During the daylight saving time, has your life cycle affected by the gain or loss of an hour of sleep? How do you feel when you have additional/fewer hour to sleep?
I’m going to say I’d really like to have one more hour, but I have to give an hour back later, which kills me.
- Due to the daylight saving time, it gets darker earlier during the winter and later in the summer. Does it influence how you spend your leisure time? Or do you stick to the actual hours regardless of how bright/dark it is?
Actually, I kind of experience more like a jet lag. Eventually, I will get use to the new times. But it won’t affect my leisure time in actual sense.
- Some countries outside of the United States are not observing the daylight saving time. What could be some of the possible reasons that they don’t?
I don’t know. Even in the United States, many different states don’t use daylight saving time. I think it’s not necessary, actually, because it’s affecting our time of sleeping. In China, they don’t do daylight saving time. China is even bigger than the United States. I don’t know why they’re doing this, but I think observing the daylight saving time is stupid. For the case of China, if I have a friend far away from me, we would still be in the same time zone.
- What is your opinion towards the current form of daylight saving time? Should it be kept the same way or changed? Why?
I think it should be repealed. Because, like I had said before, it’s not necessary. It will affect our sleep.
Reflection
For this project, I asked my classmate Amo for an interview regarding the daylight saving time. She accepted my request, under the condition that the interview will be held in the form of voice recording. She wanted to start the interview immediately after I asked her, but I had not finalized my questions yet at the moment, so I had to schedule it on the following day before a class. I realized that if I were to ask a stranger on a street for an interview, I would not have been successful without my questions ready and complete in advance. Since I was interviewing someone I knew and could contact anytime, I overlooked the basic component of interview. For my questions, I came up with a few introductory questions that could smoothly lead to my main topic of discussion. Because the daylight saving time influences people’s sleeping cycle, I started the interview by asking about the average hours of sleep and the life style, and then I dived into the daylight saving time questions. Turns out Amo needs many hours of sleep to perform well, which seems to be constantly disrupted by her circumstance. As a result, she appreciates an extra hour of sleep, but losing an hour would likely influence her very much. Interestingly, even though she said she needs some time to overcome the effects of the daylight saving time (“like a jet lag”), it does not seem to affect her plans for the day like a leisure time. I expected that the difference between the body’s circadian clock and the amount of light outside would cause some issues for people, but it was not the case for her. She was clearly against the concept of the daylight saving time, and I liked it when she mentioned the case of China, which was part of my research and one of the evidences for my argument. Overall, it was in interesting experience, but since it was my first time interviewing someone with recording, there were some room for improvement. For example, it was little challenging to transcribe what she said in the recording; I should have picked a quieter place or asked her to speak a little louder. Also, I felt like there were moments where I could have asked for further questions based on her responses, but I was too fixed on asking my prepared ones and failed to pull out more complex responses.
