Interviews - Unstructured (or Informal) interviews

These interviews are more like a guided conversation. The interviewer has freedom to vary the questions, their wording, order etc. from one interview to the next. Follow-up questions can be asked as needed such as Dobash and Dobash - "Violence Against Wives" who conducted 109 unstructured interviews with women who had experienced battering. All the women had lived in refuges and no-one asked had refused to take part. The interviews were conducted by two female researchers and varied in length between 2 and 12 hours. The women were asked to talk freely about the first, the worse and the last experience of violence. All the interviews were taped and when the women did not talk freely, they were gently probed by the interviewer. Dobash and Dobash were able to provide detailed accounts of the women's experiences and they also gained some understanding of the meanings and their experiences.

The advantages and disadvantages for unstructured interviews are shown below. Each of these has been previously covered.

Advantages of Unstructured Interviews:
Rapport and Sensitivity
The Interviewer's View
Checking and Understanding
Flexibility
Exploring Unfamiliar Topics


Disadvantages of Unstructured Interviews:
Practical Problems
Representativeness
Reliability
Quantification
Validity



Semi-structured interviews:
In between structured and unstructured interviews, lies the aptly named semi-structured interview. Each interview has the same set of questions in common but the interviewer can also probe for more information. Cicourel and Kitsuse always followed up their questions with "How do you mean?" or "Could you explain further?" as a way of gaining more information.


Group Interviews and Focus Groups:
These can involve up to a dozen or so people being interviewed at the same time. They will be asked to discuss a particular topic and their views will be recorded. These types of interviews have certain strengths and weaknesses compared to one on one interviews. Firstly, people may be more likely to open up in front of a group. It can stimulate each other's thinking and the interviewer can observe group dynamics. In terms of disadvantages, one or two individuals may dominate a group session, it can be hard to keep the group focussed on the discussion. Peer group pressure may lead some people not to voice their own opinions and finally data gathered is difficult to record and analyse what happens in these focus groups. One example is Willis whose study "Learning to Labour" used group interviews as part of his research into working class lads and their negative attitudes towards school.