strengths and limitations of unstructured interview

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strengths and limitations of unstructured interview.

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  • Created by: Mamuna R.
  • Created on: 10-05-13 22:34

Strengths and limitations of unstructured interview

Advantages

  • the interviewer finds it easy to to build a rapport with the respondent
  • Qualitative data: The interviewer can get detail and in-depth answers of the attitudes  feelings and reasons of their answers or behaviours.
  • Highly flexible
  • high in validity,
  • link with official statistics which cannot provide the reasons and details behind the trends and patterns of the study.
  • Preferred by internationalist and interpretivists.
  • Talk abour William Labov's study on Black American pupils where he found theat these pupils are more relaxed and confortable with unstructured interviews rather than formal structure predetermined interviews.
  • no or very predetermined questions which allows the interview to ask as many questions as they find necessary.
  • Interviewers can also find out answers about certain aspects that they didn't anticipated off.
  • Unstructured interviews allows the interviewer to look into sensitive issues such as sexual abuse, bully,domestic violence etc...

Disadvantages

  • Time- consuming, expensive, the research requires skilled and trainned researcher to note the body language and emotions of the respondent.
  • When researching schools (to investigate linguistic deprivation, effects of steaming, labelling, anti-school subculture or truancy) - then it becomes very hard for the reaesrcher to get access into the school as schools are very precious about their reputation and mage in the public.  --> Think about MARKETISATION, league tables, Ofsted reports.
  • Not representative due to very small sample size - cannot make comparisons as every single interviews are unique and different even if it is the same person.
  • when investigating puplis for instance they may give an Invalid answer and give right-answerism (you say something that is expected from you but not necessarily true)- as pupils may think that teachers are in disiguise
  • Peer group pressure - when a interview is interviewing a group of pupil then that specific pupil may not say the truth due to pear pressure or embarrassment or even because of the presence of the research.
  • When researchers are interivewing an anti-school sub-culture they have to keep in mind of the language barnes, such as EAL and their age as they might have difficulty understand  the words or sociological words such as material deprivation or norms and values.
  • Lacks qualitative data, unscientific, unsystematic and non-subjective - strongly disliked by positivists.
  • Guilty Knowledge: if a researcher discovers something that may get the pupil into trouble (stealing for instance) and tell the authority then they will be breaking confidentiality, consent. However, as adults they have the responsibility to protect children as they are vulnerable, but they have informed consent and then it is anonymous to to expose the secret. Another guilty knowledge would that the researcher might be getting involve in the illegal or immoral activities which will then lose objectively and focus from the study, therefore, the research will soon become a part of the member.

Evaluation

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