Unstructured Interviews as a research method
- Created by: Megnicpip
- Created on: 18-02-18 19:33
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- Unstructured Interviews
- Practical Issues
- Interpersonal Skills: needed to be able to establish a rapport for interviewees to answer fully and honestly
- Time and Sample Size: relatively small samples which take a long time to conduct as they are explorative
- Training: needs to be thorough with a background in sociology which adds cost to conducting
- Ethical Issues
- Rapport
- Puts interviewees at ease and encourages them to speak
- Labov: by sitting on the floor using an informal style the child opened up and spoke freely
- Sensitive Topics
- Psychological harm can be caused from memories of traumatic events
- Dobash: domestic violence study-the empathy and encouragement given to participants made them feel comfortable
- Rapport
- Theoretical Issues
- Validity
- overall they are valid
- interactions involved inevitably colours and distorts information
- Reliability
- Unreliable: not standardized as each interview is unique, therefore virtually impossible to replicate
- Quantification
- Open-ended questions so are not pre-coded
- less useful for establishing cause and effect relationships as well as for hypothesis testing
- Representativeness
- Smaller numbers make it hard to make true generalisations
- Checking Understanding
- follow-up questions can be used
- Questions can be clarified
- Interviewee's View
- Greater freedom making it more likley to produce valid data
- Dean et al: 90 min interviews with 85 participants
- Flexibility
- highly flexible as no restrictions
- new ideas can be formed making it good for hypotheis testing
- Validity
- Practical Issues
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