Sociology - Structured Interviews

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  • Created by: Iqra
  • Created on: 18-12-12 18:22
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  • Structured Interviews
    • Standardised questionnaires. Each interview uses exactly the same questions, wording and tone of voice
      • Semi Structured interviews are where there are common questions, but the researcher can add additional questions
    • Quick and cheap for large number of people
    • Suitable for gathering factual information like age, job or religion.
    • Closed ended questions with precoded questions are easy to quantify.
    • Training is straight forward and cheap.
    • Response rates are higher due to face to face interaction.
    • Inflexible, researcher can  not follow any new leads.
    • Snapshots of a moment in time.
    • May feel under pressure to answer
    • Informed consent, guarantee confidentiality and no pressure to answer questions.
    • Positivism
      • Seek laws of cause and effect
      • SI allow them to test hypotheses by showing correlations and possible cause and effect relationships
    • Interpretivist
      • Lack validity
        • Give responders little freedom to explain questions or misunderstandings.
        • Forcing interviewees from limited number of answers
        • May lie or exaggerate
        • Impose researcher's ideas
    • Reliablity
      • Same standardized questions can be used again.
      • Same set of questions can be asked, this making it easier to compare and identify sim and differences
    • Represent
      • Large numbers can be conducted
      • Positivists need data to be representative to make generalised cause and effect statements
    • Feminism Criticisms
      • Relationship between interviewer and interviewee reflect the exploitative nature of patriarchal gender relationships
        • Oakley - Maculine approach to research values objectively regards science more important that people's interests.
      • Graham - distort women's experiences due to researcher's imposing categories on women

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wngono

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A great summary of interviews as a research methods which also includes the key issues great for GROVER analysis.

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