Interview And Unstructured Interview

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Interviews
Interviews are considered a key method for collecting rich data through interaction with individuals in human and social research, especially in qualitative field (Bernard, 2011; Brinkmann, 2014; Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015; Seidman, 2012; Weiss, 1995). According to Patton (2015) “interviews are open-ended questions and probes yield in-depth response about people’s experiences, perceptions, opinions, feelings, and knowledge” (p 14). In other words, interviews provide insights about participants’ own believes, experiences through social interaction to build more knowledge and understanding about individuals’ behaviors and actions. Brinkmann (2014) identified three kinds of interviews: 1) structured, 2) semi-structured, and 3) unstructured …show more content…

Unstructured interviews, on the other hand, do not have structured format of questions that the researcher need follow in order to elicit information from the participants. Instead, the participants narrate their life stories and experiences, and the researcher plays a role of listener who draws knowledge from their stories and thinks about how to facilitate the interview process to understand participants’ stories and experiences in undisruptive way (Brinkmann, 2014; Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015). The unstructured interviews are widely used in narrative and ethnographic inquiries that rely on participants’ life stories and oral histories to understand the research problem as narrated by the participants (Patton, 2015). Semi-structured interviews, on the other hand, are interviews “with the purpose of obtaining descriptions of the life …show more content…

Although face to face interviews have many advantages such as providing rich context of knowledge in terms of seeing or monitoring body language, gestures, and facial expressions of the participants which are absent in telephone interviews, the latter also have some advantages such as being less cost effective, allows the researcher to interact with interviewee overseas in various geaographical areas (Glesne, 2011; Seidman, 2013), and offer anonymity to interviewees and enables them to talk freely, and honestly (Hughes, 2008). In addition, they are unintimidating, there is no reaction to the appearance of the researcher, and they are safe (Bernard,

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