Unstructured interviews in research

Unstructured interviews in research

Student one: response to the assignment

Three concepts that I find easy to incorporate in my research are:

1) Unstructured interviews in qualitative research are helpful in gathering information. Some rapport should be established initially in order to have information. If conducted in a natural setting they would be helpful in leading to the exact goal.

For eg: I want to conduct research about raising autistic kids, if I have word with teachers or parents in the school environment it would fetch me good results.

2) Rating scale of quantitative research – This is the easiest thing. One needs to design a questionnaire, it eliminates subjectivity to large extent and it is also time-saving compared to the open-end questionnaire if we take the same example, then designing tasks performed by autistic kids would give a fair idea about their motor skills.

3) Data analysis in qualitative research – This is also very easy to incorporate as extraneous variables are controlled, we can have a co-relation factor, standard deviation, or very simple average factor. We can have perfect study or it may reach to that level.

Three difficult concepts that I find difficultly envisioning how I will incorporate into research are:

1) Interpreting qualitative research – since it would be open-ended, there would lot of ideas, creativity, etc., so by in large it would be difficult to come to a point while studying everybody’s data. It is difficult to map down data from the information.

2) Extraneous variables involved in the open-end questionnaire, the subject may tell as per his current mood or motive. There can be any past event or incident which may trigger his mind while describing a question. Hence a great needs to be taken while interpreting data.

3) Variability of data quantity – In order to perform this research a large number of participants are required to come to a point, small no. of people may not work. It is a very expensive and time-consuming task.

Reference

Lewandowski, G. W., Ciarocco, N. J, & Strohmetz, D. B. (2019). Discovering the Scientist Within: Research Methods in Psychology (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Macmillan Higher Education