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After reading this article you will learn about the structures and unstructured interviews used for conducting social research.
The Structured Interviews:
Such interviews involve the use of a set of pre-determined questions and highly standardized techniques of recording. The reasons for standardization is to ensure that all respondents reply to the same questions; that is, any given question has the same meaning for all the respondents. Structured interviews mostly involve the use of fixed, alternative questions.
The alternative questions or close-ended questions are those in which the responses of the subjects are limited to certain fixed, pre-designated alternatives.
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These alternatives may simply be ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or may consist of a series of anticipated replies out of which the respondent picks any one (or more) which is closest to his position. Structured interviews may also involve the use of open-ended questions but the questions and their order are pre-determined.
The interviewer is, however, free to repeat the question if the reply is not to the point. Generally, the interviewer has no freedom to waive a question except to get clarification of the subject’s responses and these questions must be non-directive or non-suggestive.
Unstructured Interviews:
Unstructured interviews, as opposed to the structured ones, are characterized by a far too greater flexibility of approach to questioning the respondents. Compared to the structured interview, the non-structured ones involve relatively much lesser standardization of relevant techniques and operations. Consequently, the investigator is never certain as to what the respondents will give out as information.
Interviewers in this type of interview, do not follow a system or list of predetermined questions. Respondents are encouraged to relate freely and frankly their concrete experience with little or no directions from the interviewer.
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The respondents are allowed and freedom to talk on whatever events seem significant to them, to provide their own definitions of the social situation, report their own foci of attention and reveal their attitudes and opinion as they deem it.
The flexibility of the unstructured interview properly utilized helps to bring out the affective and value-laden aspects of the subjects’ responses and to determine the personal significance of his attitudes. Such interviews permit a free-flowing account of the personal and social contexts of beliefs and feelings.
This type of interview achieves its designated purpose depending on the extent to which the subject’s responses are spontaneous rather than forced; specific, concrete and self-revealing.
In a non-structured interview, the interviewer is allowed a much greater freedom to ask, if he feels so, any supplementary questions, or if the situation so demands to omit certain questions, to change the sequence of questions and if need be, to offer explanations and clarifications.
The interviewer has much greater freedom to record the responses according to his own frame of judging significance, relevance, and convenience. He is free to include some aspects and exclude others from his record, highlight certain responses and ignore or underplay others. Granted such freedom, the interviewer has both advantages as well as disadvantages.
Such a flexibility frequently results in lack of comparability between one interview and another. Further, analysis of the unstructured responses is much more difficult and time- consuming than that of the structured responses secure during the structured interviews.
The non-structured interviews usually demand deep knowledge and skill on the part of the interviewer. The interviewer is expected to possess not only the general skill, and capacity demanded of any sympathetic listener, but also the specific ability to adopt temporarily the beliefs and attitudes of each of his informants.
The collection of material by such a flexible means is inevitably slow and normally only a small sample can be expected to be covered. Because of the unrestricted range of subjects on which the respondents may desire to discuss, it is very difficult to articulate the recorded responses of different interviews into a single scheme.
We may now point out the major advantages of the non-structured interview. In so far as such interviews facilitate free and uninhibited responses from the respondents, the informant has the facility to be much more open and articulate.
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His accounts in the hands of a skilled researcher may fertilize into very fruitful insights and hypotheses. In explanatory/formulative studies, such interviews are indeed the central technique of collecting information. As Johan Galtung says, “The advantage of unstructured response is to be un-precise; that they permit the unexpected response.”
Such interviews also have the advantage of leaving a favourable impact on the informant who will have acquired in the process of interview a certain element of skill in self-analysis and thus be in full sympathy with the subject-matter as also with the substance of the interview record.
The above discussion also suggests by way of contrast, the major merits of the structured interviews, these being the comparability of interview records, uniformity which facilitates bringing these different records into some unified conceptual scheme affording dependable basis generalization.
Being more economical, structured interviews afford a larger coverage in terms of respondents. Lastly, they demand lesser skills on the part of the interviewer. We shall now consider some of the major types of unstructured interview and partially structured interview.
(a) Focused Interview:
The main objective of this type of interview is to focus attention on the given experience of the respondent and its possible effects. The interviewer knows in advance the aspects of a question he has to cover.
The list of aspects is derived from his formulation of the research-problem, from hypothesis based on a psychological or sociological theory, from his knowledge of the situation or the experience in which the respondent has participated.
Thus, the interviewer has a definite framework of topics to be covered but he has more or less complete freedom to decide the manner and the sequence in which the questions would be asked. The interviewer has freedom to explore reasons and motives: to probe further in directions he thinks would afford clues.
In such interviews, although the respondent is free to express completely his own line of thought, the direction of the interview is mainly in the hands of the interviewer. The interviewer wants a definite type of information and as such his task is to confine the respondent to a discussion on such issues with which he seeks conversance.
The focused interviews have been used effectively in the development of hypotheses about the aspects of specific experience that may expectedly lead to change in attitude on the part of those exposed to experience.
Obviously, the more detailed a researcher’s knowledge of the situation in which the person being interviewed has participated and the more specific his hypothesis, the more precisely he can outline in advance the questions to be covered in course of the interview.
(b) The Clinical Interview:
This type of interview is quite similar to the focused interview, the primary difference between them being that the clinical interview is concerned with broad underlying feelings or motivations or with the course of individuals’ life experience, rather than with the effects of the specific experience, as in the focused interview.
As in the focused interview, here too, the interviewer knows in advance what aspects method of eliciting information is more or less completely left to his discretion. The most common types of clinical interviews are those conducted during social case work in psychiatric clinics and in prison administration.
(c) The Non-Directive Interview:
Although a few books on research techniques use the terms non-directive interview and unstructured interview almost interchangeably or synonymously, we shall prefer to treat these as distinct. In the non-directive interview, the initiative is completely in the hands of the respondent.
The term ‘non- directive’ received its currency from a type of psychotherapy in which the patient is encouraged to express his feelings without any questions or suggestions from the therapist.
In a more limited sense, non-direction is implicit in most interviewing, i.e., although the interviewer is expected to ask questions about the given topics, he is not supposed to bias or direct the respondent to one rather than another response.
In non-directive interviewing, however, the interviewer’s function is simply to encourage the respondent to talk about the given topic with a bare minimum of direct questioning or guidance. He encourages the respondent to talk fully and freely by being alert to the feelings expressed in the respondent’s statement and by warm but non-committal recognition of the subject’s feelings.
The non-directive interviewer’s function is primarily to serve as a catalyst to a comprehensive expression of the subject’s feelings and beliefs and of the frame of reference within which his feelings and beliefs take on a personal significance.
To achieve this result the interviewer must create a completely permissive atmosphere in which the subject is free to express himself without fear of disapproval, admonition and advice from the interviewer.
Against the backdrop of the above discussion covering some of the major types of interviews, we may say that each one has its own strong points as well as limitations and that each is suited to a particular kind of situation and patently desirable in obtaining specific kinds of data.
Despite the varied manifestations and version of interview methodology, we may point out the major overall advantages and limitations of the method in a general way.