Advantages & Disadvantages of Unstructured Interviews

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Advantages & Disadvantages of Unstructured Interviews

Advantages

  • As these interviews are respondent led, respondents can express themselves and explain their views with more freedom than with structured interviews.
  • They are flexible, so the researcher can ask follow up questions and change their mind about questions as they go on.
  • They can spark discussion of ideas the researcher may have not even thought of, expanding the research.
  • As they are informal, they encourage a good rapport between the researcher & participant.
  • Due to good rapport created by this kind of interview, openness, trust and verstehen is encouraged which could be useful for sensitive topics.
  • They are practical as the interviewer can check if the respondent understands the question and is free to rephrase it.

Disadvantages

  • There is a lack of reliability as each interview is unique, with a variety of different questions asked to many participants.
  • Interviewer bias may have an effect on the validity.
  • It is hard to analyse and quantify the data collected as it is qualitative and there would be a lot of it.
  • These interviews are time consuming.
  • There may be a lack of representativeness as these interviews are very time consuming so only a select number of participants could be used.

Evaluation

Unstructured interviews are useful for collecting rich in detail qualitative data, and establishing trust, rapport and verstehen with participants. They are also good for checking participant understanding. However they are very time consuming and produce data that is difficult to analyse. The results may also lack reliability and representativeness.

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