Unstructured Interviews

Unstructured Interviews

1. Practical

   • Ethnographic as it is carried out in a natural setting where the participant feels comfortable
   • Allows the researcher to understand the participants context and perspective
     • Easily go off topic
   • Highly flexible as there is no set fix of questions
     • Time consuming to carry out over a couple of hours rather than minutes
     • Costs for training the interviewer and equipment
   • Participant has time to speak about topics they believe are important
     • Follow up ideas, probe responses and investigate motives
       • Interviewer bias

2. Ethical

   • Sensitive topics require a rapport and verstehen to make participant feel comfortable
     • Participant can still show social desirability even through a rapport
   • Participant has freedom to talk in their own terms about the issues
     • Cannot guarantee anonymity
   • Respondent validation- increases validity and checks to see the truthfulness
     • Participant may feel pressured to answer questions
   • Participant has time to clarify and explain
     • Interviewer may not have verstehen which causes bias data findings

3. Theoretical

   • Interpretivist like this method because it creates qualitative data and takes into consideration of feelings, emotion and thoughts
     • Positivists think this isn't reliable and so you can't generalise this to society
   • reflexivity, rapport, verstehen established and subjective
     • Not value free, not objective, not scientific. Excess data collection takes time to analyse