Methods In Context - Usuing Interviews To Investigate Education

Question 1

Practical issues

Answer 1

-young people’s linguistic and intellectual skills are less developed than those of adults and thus may pose practical problems for interviewers. Young interviewers may:
- be less articulate or more reluctant to talk
- not understand long, complex questions or some abstract concepts
- have a more limited vocabulary and use words incorrectly or differently from adult, e.g slang
- have a shorter attention span and poorer memory retrieval than adults
- read body language differently from adults

• these factors may lead to misunderstandings and incorrect or incomplete answers and thus undermine the validity of data obtained. Such communication difficulties also mean that unstructured interviews may be more suitable than structured ones, since they allow the interviewer more scope to clear up misunderstanding’s by re wording questions or explaining there meaning

Question 2

Practical issues - children

Answer 2

• children may also have more difficulty in keeping to the point, especially in unstructured interviews. As poweny and watts note, young children tend to be more literal minded and often pay attention to unexpected details in questions, and may use a different logic from adult interviewers. Training therefore needs to be more thorough for someone interviewing children, which adds to the costs of research
• however, given that young people tend to have better verbal than literacy skills, interviews may be ,ore successful than written questionnaires as a method of obtaining valid answers

Question 3

Practical issues - school

Answer 3

• another practical problem is that schools have very active informal communication channels. This means that the content of the interview may get around pupils and teachers after only a few interviews have taken place. This may influence the responses given by later interviewees, therefore reducing the validity of the data
• the location of the interview can also be problematic. If interviews are conducted on school premises this may affect how comfortable the pupil/parent feels

Question 4

Reliability and validity

Answer 4

• structured interviews produce reliable data because they are standardised: each interview is conducted in precisely the same way, with the same questions, in the same order, tone of voice etc
• however structured interviews may not produce valid data, since young people are unlikely to response favourably to such a formal style
  -instead of using this formal approach, therefore Bentley began each interview by showing them a ‘jokey’ image of her fooling around with her daughter. During the interview, she maintained a relaxed atmosphere by nodding, smiling and making eye contact
• however, this is a very personal interviewing style that cannot easily be standardised. Therefore, different interviewers would be likely to obtain very different results and this would reduce the reliability and comparability of their findings

Question 5

Access and response rate

Answer 5

• schools are hierarchical institutions and thus can cause problems when seeking to interview teachers or pupils. As powney and Watts notes, the lower down the hierarchy the interviewee is, the more approvals that have to be obtained. Therefore, to interview a teacher, a researcher might first have to obtain the permission of the head teacher, whereas to interview pupils may require parental consent as well
• schools may also be reluctant to allow sociologists to conduct interviews during lesson time because of the disruption is causes, or because they object to the researchers chosen topics.
• there may be problems conducting interviews after school

Question 6

The interviewer as ‘teacher in disguise’

Answer 6

• power and status inequalities can affect the outcome of interviews. If interviewees have less power than the interviewer, they may see it as being in their own interests to lie, exaggerate, conceal information or seek to please when answering questions. They may also be less self confident and their responses less articulate. All this will reduce the validity of the data
• there are power ands status inequalities between young people and adults. Interviewers are usually adults and children may see them as authority figures. This is even more likely in educational research, especially if the interviews are conducted on school premises. Bell notes that pupils may see the interviewer as a ‘teacher in disguise’
• this may affect the validity of the data in several ways. E.g, pupils may seek to win the ‘teachers’ approval by giving untrue but socially acceptable answers that shoe them in a favourable light
• pupils are accustomed to adults ‘knowing better’ and so may deter to them in interviews. E.g, children are more likely to change their original answers when question is repeated because they think it must have been wrong
• the interview is a social interaction. The inequalities between children and adults, pupils and teachers, may influence this interaction and thus distract the data obtained

Question 7

Improving the validity of interviews with pupils

Answer 7

• the researcher can adopt strategised to improve the validity of interviews with pupils and young people. E.g, greene and hogan argue that interviews should:
• use open ended - rather than close ended questions
• not interrupt children’s answers
• tolerate long pauses - to allow children to think about what they want to say
• recognise that children are more suggestible - and so it is particularly important to avoid asking leading questions
• avoid repeating questions - since this makes children change their first answer because they think it was wrong
• in general, unstructured interviews may be more suitable for overcoming barriers of power and status inequality. Their informality can put young interviewees as ease and establish rapport - can encourage them to open up

Question 8

Group interviews with pupils

Answer 8

• an alternative to the convention one to one interview is the group interview. This has both strengths and limitations as a method of studying education
• pupils and young people are often strongly influenced by peer pressure and this may reduce the validity of the data gathered in a group interview, where individuals may conform to peer expectations rather than express what they truly think
• the free flowing nature of group interviews makes it impossible to standardise the questions and this will reduce the reliability of the method and the comparability of findings
• on the other hand greene and hogan argue that group interviews are particularly suitable for use with pupils. They create a safe peer environment and they reproduce the small group settings that young people are familiar with