Chapter 9 describes the role of interviews as a data collecting tool. Interviews act as a medium to reveal the characteristics of people. They are easy to administer and allow people to express themselves in their native language. On the other hand, in an interview, respondents might exaggerate their responses in order to impress the interviewer. Interviews are also time-taking and cost-expensive.
Interviews are classified into Structured, unstructured and semi-structured depending upon the design and protocol. Structured interviews have a strict design pattern and unique script of questions which are uniform to all respondents. Unstructured interviews are minimized in terms of structure and ensure complete understanding of the respondent’s answers. Between these two categories lies a third set of pattern called semi-structured interviews which has no structure and no protocol. This type of interview involves a set of predefined questions and combines a standard strategy and flexible implementation.
Focus groups are also implemented in an interview whose goal is to collect data from multiple respondents at a time. It is time saving and reduces the implementation cost. However, one has to compromise on the complexity involved to gather a large number of people. Focus groups may also end up in situations where a few people are actually talking and the rest are just prompting which may end up in short, incorrect and unhelpful answers.
Relevance and clarity are the standards one has to meet to make sure every respondent understands the question in the same way. The questions can be open ended where the respondent has the freedom to answer in his desirable way or close ended where one has to decide among a set of options which may sometimes end up in a long list of answers. Another set of questions called the hybrid lie in between these two which includes both approaches.
The nature of the respondent can be categorized as elite respondents who possess expertise in the subject and easily understand jargons, and mass respondents who have no special knowledge in that particular field. Hence the questions should be framed accordingly. Implementation of an interview starts with recruiting the respondents. As it involves compensating the respondents, utmost care has to be taken. The next stage is to conduct the interview in an environment that is comfortable to the respondents. The key stage is to record the responses in a proper format with the use of interview codes. The succeeding stage involves notes taking where the respondent can comment on his intent in case of any errors and recording which involves transcribing the interview.
The final stage deals with the ethical conduct which involves informed consent of the respondents, data protection which deals with the protection of the collected data, anonymity to keep the data anonymous and finally confidentiality of the data to make sure data is kept only to the research team. Since interviews are considered to be a crucial part of any public research, one has to take great care to design an efficient and ethical interview protocol and make sure this technique forms an important part of any research program.
