Unstructured Interviews

Unstructured Interviews

1. Practical issues

   • Their informality allows the interviewer to develop a rapport
   • Training needs to be more thorough than for structured interviews
   • They take a long time
   • They produce large amounts of data, which can take time to transcribe
   • They make it much easier for interviewer and interviewe to check they have understood each other's meanings
   • They are very flexible
   • They are useful where the subject is one we know little about, because they are open-ended and explanatory

2. Theoretical issues

   • Interpretivism
     • Validity through involvement
     • Grounded theory
     • The interviewee's view
   • Positivism
     • Reliability
     • Quantification
     • Representativeness
     • Lack of validity
   • Feminism
     • Oakley argues that there is a superior and distinctively feminist approach to research
       • Value-committed
       • Requires the researcher's involvement with the lives of the woman studied
       • Aims for equality and collaboration between the researcher and researched, rather than hierarchy and control by the researcher