Structured interview A2
- Created by: Busayoxo
- Created on: 11-01-18 09:28
View mindmap
- Structured interviews
- Each interview is conducted in the same standardised way with the same question
- Practical
- Advantages
- Quick and easy to administrate because a large number of people are covered
- Eg : Young and Willmott (1962) used this when interviewing 933 families in East London
- Easy to find out facts about people: eg their race, age, gender
- Higher response rate than questionnaire because people find it hard to turn people down face to face
- Eg: Young and Willmott got 54 refusals out of the 987 people they approached
- Quick and easy to administrate because a large number of people are covered
- Disadvantages
- Interview schedule made before hand - structured interviews are inflexible - have to stick to a strict schedule. Impossible to follow interesting leads the may find when carrying out the interview.
- Interviewers must have a clear subject and hypothesis due to the interview schedule being made beforehand. Unsuitable to study unfamiliar topics where the researcher doesn’t know what is important or not.
- Advantages
- Theories
- Positivism
- See society as a scientific study. So like structured interviews believe it's a good way to study scientific sociology.
- Produce generalised, representative,
reliable, objective and detached method for producing quantitative data,
testing hypothesis and
identifying cause and effect relationships – Casual laws
can then be tested due to this .
- (correlation can be found between two things, eg men and trashy behaviour and you can generalise eg men are more likely to be trash)
- (after you find a link between two things you can then try and find an explanation for why this is the case eg: due to primary socialisation women commit less crime than men)
- Reliabity
- Standardised measuring
instrument- reliable because they are easy to standardise and control.
- Eg: interviewers can be trained to carry interviews using the same tone of voice, questions, wording, order etc.. – Therefore easy to replicate as it is not based on an interviewers personal characteristics as it is carried out in the same way
- Pre-coded answers (where you get to choose a particular answer eg male or female or non-binary, Black British or White British etc.) means that interviews can be categorised in the same way as in the original interview.
- Standardised measuring
instrument- reliable because they are easy to standardise and control.
- Representativeness
- Advantages
- quick and cheap to conduct- large number of people served- representative sample.
- Sophisticated sampling techniques and relatively high response rates , representativeness increased. Good for positivists, make generalisations from this representative data about cause-effect relationships
- Disadvantages
- People willing to be interviewed maybe untypical of the population (eg. May be lonely).- could make unrepresentative info in the data - limits the validity of any generalisations a sociologist may make.
- Advantages
- Intepretivism
- Use closed-ended questions. Interviewees are only able to choose from a limited no of pre-set answers. But if this does not match what the interviewee wanted to answer the data will be invalid.
- Sociologists have a pre-set interview schedule without knowing a lot about the topic.
- Structured interviews impose researcher’s framework of ideas on interviewees – limits it validity because it doesn’t show what the interviewee sees as important.
- Positivism
- Feminism
- Relationship between the researcher and researched mirrors exploitative nature of gender relationships in the patriarchal society
- Shulamit Reinharz (1983) the approach to data collection “research as ****” – Researcher “intrude(s) into subjects’ privacy ... manipulates the relationships, and gives little or nothing in return”
- Ann Oakley (1981) positivistic “masculine” approach to research puts emphasis on objectivity, detachment and hierarchy and thinks that “science” is more important than researching what the people think are important.
- Hilary Graham (1983) SI give a distorted and invalid picture of women’s experiences. Impose the researcher’s categorises on women, mark it hard for them to tell their experiences and hide the unequal power relationships between men and women.
Comments
No comments have yet been made