qualitative methods 2 Flashcards
what is a conversational interview?
represents an alternative set of techniques to standardized survey interviewing whereby interviewers are allowed to provide unscripted information to respondents in an effort to clarify question meaning.
what are some problems with interviews? (3)
Are you being told what the interviewee wants you to think and not what is really going on?
How do you know if the interviewee is not getting his/her facts/interpretations right?
Double hermeneutic?
why are interviews useful? (3)
- You get information from the horse’s mouth
- You can interact with interviewee and react to their answers (ie not one-off snapshot responses)
- You can cross-check much of what you hear with other sources
what are 4 issues with focus groups?
- You have less control over the direction a group discussion takes over a one-to-one interview
- Data can be tough to analyse as the talking is in reaction to the comments of other group members
- Observers/moderators need to be highly trained
- Clearly not large enough to be a representative sample of a population (they are not opinion polls)
what are some general issues with qualitative data? (3)
reliability, generalizability, validity
how did Blair use focus groups?
to test out policy ideas on carefully selected groups of voters to see how they react
how did Jon Cruddas (a former advisor to Blair) criticise his use of focus groups?
“Too much policy was based on the preferences and prejudices of barely representative focus groups”
what are the 3 key components of an experiment?
intervention, random allocation between groups and measuring outcomes
what is intervention?
Researcher doesn’t just observe, but intervenes to observe the effect of that intervention
how are the groups divided in an experiment? what does this control?
dividing the group into one group and a control group, the extraneous factors
what did Druckman et al find about experiments?
they were cited (on average) 47% more than non-experimental research
what are laboratory experiments?
recruit subjects to a common location, where the experiment occurs
why are laboratory experiments used?
gives the researcher better control
what is an example of a laboratory experiment?
Dawes et al – found people were only motivated by money back guarantee’s in chance of failure, not guaranteed money in case of success – he puts this down to motivations of greed, rather than fear of loss
what is an advantage of a field experiment?
more people able to be involved