Using interviews to investigate education: a summary
- Created by: Azia Singh
- Created on: 14-05-16 18:17
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- Using interviews to investigate education
- Practical issues
- Young people's linguistic and intellectual skills are less developed than adults'
- Janet Powney and Mike Watts: children tend to be more literal minded and often pay attention to unexpected details in questions
- Young people do however tend to have better verbal than literacy skills
- The interviewer as 'teacher in disguise'
- If interviewees have less power than the interviewer, they may see it as in their best interests to alter their answers. They also may be less self-confident and so less articulate. This reduces the validity of the data
- Improving the validity of interview with pupils (Sheila Greene and Diane Hogan)
- Avoid repeating questions
- Recognise that children are more suggestible
- Tolerate long pauses
- Don't interrupt children's answers
- Use open-ended questions
- Group interviews with pupils
- The free-flowing nature makes it impossible to standardise the questions
- Pupils and young people are often strongly influenced by peer pressure
- Greene and Hogan: create a safe peer environment and reproduce the small group settings pupils are familiar with in classroom work
- Reveal the interactions between pupils
- Access and response rate
- Powney and Watts: the lower down the hierarchy the interviewee is, the more approvals that have to be obtained
- Schools may be reluctant to let sociologists conduct research during lesson time because of the disruption it causes
- Or because of the topic of research
- Reliability and validity
- Structured interviews produce reliable data because they are standardised
- However may not produce valid data because young people are unlikely to respond favourably to such a formal style
- Structured interviews produce reliable data because they are standardised
- Practical issues
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