Structured interviews

Structured interviews

1. Practical issues

   • Using structured interviews can cover many people w/ limited resources.
     • still cannot match numbers reached by postal questionaires.
   • Training interviewers is relatively inexpensive
     • interviewers are still more expensive than mass posting/emailing questionaires to people.
   • Suitable for gathering straightforward factual information like a person's job or age.
   • Results are easily quantified. suitable for testing a hypothesis.
   • Likely to have representative sample
     • More likely than questionnaires even considering disprarity in number reached.
       • People are more likely to agree because of social desirability, possible convinience and they prefer human interaction to filling out a form.

2. Theoretical issues

   • Validity
     • The usage of close ended questions can present a problem
       • Interviewee may not feel like the avaliable, preset answer fully represents their preferred answer - makes given answer data invalid