Strengths and limitation P.E.T - Unstructured interviews

Question 1

Practical issue- Strength

Answer 1

• Less costly and time consuming- Although unstructured interviews are more costly and time consuming than structured interviews, they are still less so than other research methods such as observation
• Large sample covered than observation- Unstructured interviews can cover larger samples than observation, although this is not the case with structured interviews.

Question 2

Practical- Limitation

Answer 2

• Skilled research- the researcher need to be trained in order to become skillful at questioning techniques to draw out respondents thoughts and meanings
• Hired hand effect- Interviewing on a large scale involve employing interviews who may be less committed to the enquiry than the researcher. The failure of adequately recording open answers, deliberately questioning the wrong people out of convenience and even outright fraudulent completion of schedules by the interviewer . These can affect the validity of the data.

Question 3

Ethical- strength

Answer 3

Checking understanding- The informality of these interviews mean the interviewer can explain questions so that they are understood as well as ask their own follow up questions to clarify an interviewees meaning.

Question 4

Ethical- Limitation

Answer 4

Consent- The researcher will need the consent of the respondent if the data is to be published in the future and the respondent must know they can withdraw all or some of the data if they wish
- Risk of harm- The researcher needs to ensure that non of the questions are worded in a way which might cause more psychological stress than in normal in ordinary life.

Question 5

Theoretical - Strength

Answer 5

• Effective of sensitive issues- An informal conversation between interviewer and interviewee is more likely to generate trust and rapport between them. The interviewee is more likely to open up especially on sensitive subjects, which increases the chance of their giving true and honest answers which increase the validity of the finings.
• Deeper insight- Interpretivists argue that unstructured interview produce more valid data than structured interviews because they allow for greater exploration and depth of the topic or issue at hands. The interview carried out Dobash & Dobash were detailed and respondent are given the opportunity to express their feelings, reason and attitudes in ways which are meaningful to them. It is possible to get close to people’s actual experience.
  -Interpretivists see unstructured interviews as highly valid as they understand actors meanings
  -Positivist see unstructured interviews as unable to be quantified, generalised/compared and therefore unrepresentative and invalid because rapports can distort findings.

Question 6

Theoretical- limitation

Answer 6

• Difficult to analyse- Positivist do not favour unstructured interviews because they can produce a vast amount of qualitative data which can be difficult to analyse making it difficult to generalise from the data.
• Unreliable- Unstructured interviews have been accused of unreliability because they do not have pre- set questions with predetermined answers but allow the researcher to freely choose the type of question to ask. This makes it difficult to compare respondent answers, which in turn make it difficult to arrive as a conclusion or generalization.
• Unrepresentative- Unstructured interviews take longer to carry out than structured interviews, use their time consuming nature, so the samples tend to be small.