Structured interviews

Each interview is conducted in the same standardised way. With the same questions and wordings..

The biggest difference between this and a questionaire is that the questions are asked and filled in by an interviewer. There is a social interaction taking place. The main strengths and limitations come from this. 

Practical strengths

• quick and cheap 
• suitable for gathering straightforward information
• results are easily quantifyable
• training interviewers is cheap and straightforward
• response rates are normally higher than questionnaires, young and willmott only had 54/987 people refuse to talk to them

Practical weekness

• inflexible questions
• becuase the questions are drawn up in advanced they are often unsuitable for studying areas of unfamiliarality
• only snapshots taken at one moment in time

positivist views - they provide representative and generalised findings. They are reliable, objective and detached.  They enable them to test hypotheses and identify possible cause and effect relationships.

They can establish a relationship between variables. Just like questionaires.

This can allow us to form a hypothesis. We can see that women commit less crime than men and we can form the hypothesis…