Interviews

• what is an interview?

  face to face questioning - rather than participant filling out a questionnaire
• what are the 3 types of interviews possible?

  structured, unstructured and semi structured
• what questions are used in a structured interview?

  standardised questions - same asked to all participants
• what is an advantage of the structured interviews?

  easy to summarise and analyse the data to compare with other results
• what is a disadvantage of the structured interviews?

  less flexible type of interview (especially compared to an unstructured interview)
• what is an unstructured interview?

  where the interviewer can ask any line of question within a topic
• what is an advantage of a unstructured interview?

  • more flexible than a structured interview because questions can be changed for participants accordingly
• what is an disadvantage of a unstructured interview?

  • more difficult to summarise the data
  • more open to subjective bias
• what is a semi structured interview?

  Where the researcher has a set of questions that are to be answered but can also ask questions within in a topic -less strict format
• what is thematic analysis?

  a way of analysing qualitative data obtained from interviews, questionnaires observations and case studies
• what is identified in data to analyse using thematic analysis?

  patterns and themes that can be categorized
• what does thematic analysis enable?

  qualitative data to be converted into quantitve data so it can be summarised -central tendency and dispersion can be worked out
• what is a strength of thematic analysis?

  allows the researcher to identify themes and patterns in qualitative data so the data can be summarised
• what is a weakness of thematic analysis?

  identification of themes or patterns can become subjective - different researchers can disagree on themes or categorises which reduces the relability