Structured Interviews (Positivists) Flashcards
What are interviews?
They are tape recorded/videoed to produce transcripts from which quotes illustrate the respondent’s perspective.
Carried out in private, neutral and unthreatening venues.
What are structured interviews?
List of closed questions from an interview schedule which is read out.
Researcher plays a passive and robotic role as they aren’t allowed to deviate from the questions on the interview schedule.
Little/no flexibility in the way questions can be asked.
The interviewer can’t add or encourage new questions, they can only repeat those on the interview schedule.
Converted into quantitative forms expressed in statistics, percentages, tables charts and graphs.
STRENGTHS of structured interviews.
Closed questions and fixed-choice-tick-boxes generate large quantitative factual data which can easily be converted into tables, charts, graphs for comparison and correlation.
Conducted quickly by following a pre-set of questions thus thousands of people can be interviewed in a short period of time. This increases the possibility of getting a representative sample where generalisations can be made.
Aims and objectives can be explained to clarify instructions.
Better response rates than questionnaires as interviewers can return if the respondent isn’t home.
WEAKNESSES of structured interviews.
Artificial.
People may respond with suspicion and supply evasive or false information.
Interview bias can determine the validity of the data collected.
Interviewers may demand characteristics by unconsciously leading respondents to particular responses by the tone of voice or look of approval/disapproval.
Some respondents may negatively react due to the social characteristics (age, ethnicity, gender, social class) which can undermine the possibility for a relationship to be built.
Inflexible as the interview schedule/questionnaires are drawn up in advance and must be stuck to.
There’s difficulty for the interviewer to pursue any interesting leads.
Only a snapshot taken at the moment in time and fails to capture the dynamic and changing nature of social life.
Measure what the sociologist thinks is important rather than the interviewee’s experience.
