Unstructured Interviews
- Created by: amyjohnson1
- Created on: 04-02-22 09:19
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- Unstructured Interviews
- Practical Issues
- Their informality allows the researcher to develop a rapport
- Training needs to be more thorough than for structured interview
- Interviewer needs good interpersonal skills
- Time consuming - limits number of interviews that can be carried out
- Produce large amounts of data
- Make it easier for interviewer and interviewee to check they understand eachother
- Very flexible, not fixed to a set of questions
- Interviewer can make new hypotheses to test during the interview
- Useful where the subject is something we know little about
- Allow interviewee more opportunity to speak about what they think
- Theoretical Issues: Interpretivism
- Validity through involvement
- They believe that valid data can only be obtained by getting close to people's experience and meannings
- Can see the world from the interviewee's eyes
- Grounded theory
- Glaser and Strauss (1968) argue that it is important to approach with an open mind
- Build up and modify hypothesis during the actual course of research itself
- The interviewee's view
- Absence of pre-set questions allow interviewees freedom to raise issues and discuss what is important to them
- Can answer in their own words and express themselves
- Validity through involvement
- Theoretical Issues: Positivism
- Reliability
- Not reliable as they are not a standardised measuring instrument
- Impossible to replicate interviews
- Cannot be confident that findings are true
- Reject use of unstructured interviews
- Quantification
- Cannot easily be categorised and quantified
- Representativeness
- Less likely to produce representative data
- Sample sizes are usually smaller than structured interviews
- Lack of validity
- The interaction between them undermines its validity
- Interviewee may answer what they think the interviewer wants them to say
- Answers are not pre-coded
- Reliability
- Feminism
- Reject use of unstructured interview
- Oakley argue that there is a superior and distinctively feminist approach to research, this kind of research is:
- Value-committed: it takes a women's side and aims to give a voice to their experience
- Requires researchers involvement with the lives of women they study
- Aims for equality and collaboration between the researcher and researched
- Oakley argues that developing a more equal relationship improved the quality of her research
- Involvement in life outside of interview
- Practical Issues
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