Structured Interviews

Structured Interviews

1. Response rate

   • a high response rate increases the chances of obtaining a representative sample of the population
   • studies have shown interviews often have high response rate, this may be because; people find it to turn down a face to face request and others welcome the opportunity to talk
   • response rates can be increased if the interview purses those who fail to respond the first time
   • high response rate helps to produce a representative result and therefore makes a better basis for making generalisations
   • those who have the time or willingness to be interviewed may be untypical (have time on their hands or lonely

2. Reliability

   • structured interviews are seen as reliable as it easy for the researcher to standardise and control them
   • interviewer can make sure each interview is conducted in the same way and with the same questions in the same order
   • structured interviews provide
   • all interviewees are asked the same questions which means their answers are easy to identify and compare similarities and differences

3. Validity

   • a valid method is one that provides a true and authentic picture of the topic that is being researched
   • structured interviews often use closed ended questions that lead interviewees to choosing from a limited number of pre-set answers, if the answers don't fit what they really want to say the data will be seen as invalid
   • interviews get very little freedom to explain or clarify misunderstandings
   • people may lie or exaggerate, these responses will produce false data

4. inflexibility

   • interview must draw up questions in advance based on what he thinks is important, which may different to what the interviewee thinks is
   • interviews findings may not be valid as they do not reflect the interviewee's
   • structured interviews fail to capture the flowing, dynamic nature of social life

5. feminist criticisms

   • the researcher is in control of the interview and decides the line of questioning to be followed, not the female interviewee
   • surveys impose the researchers categories on women, making it difficult for them ti express their experiences of opression

6. Practical issues

   • results from structured interviews are easily quantifiable as they used closed ended questions with coded answers, which makes the suitable for hypothesis testing
   • they are suitable for gathering straightforward factual information such as a persons age and job
   • structured interviews can not match the potentially huge numbers of people reached by postal questionnaires
   • Although training interviewers is straightforward and not very expensive, it is more costly than postal or email questionnaires