unstructured

• practical

  • one practical advantage of unstructured interviews = good for researching sensitive subject matters
  • they don’t have pre-set list of questions / pre-coded answers as it takes a more conversational approach
  • allows researchers to gain greater understandings into sensitive topics like domestic violence (which they couldn’t do from closed-ended questions). enables researchers to be more empathetic and construct a rapport to help them to open up more about subject = rich data = more meaningful conclusions drawn = increased validity
  • however, practical disadvantage due to finding researcher with skills to construct a rapport = expensive and costly
• practical

  • one practical advantage to unstructured interviews = interviewees have more opportunity
  • no set questions = interviewee has chance to speak on matters they think are important
  • this greater freedom of expressing views = producing fresh insights and data which could be more valid as a result, which contrasts the lack of valid data which structured interviews can produce, making unstructured more preferable to interpretivists
  • however, despite unstructured giving more in-depth and meaningful data, a practical disadvantage of this is that it takes a lot longer to gather. this is because this method uses a more conversational style, as opposed to structured
• theoretical

  • one theoretical disadvantage of using unstructured interviews = lower in reliability
  • this is because this method produces unique and subjective responses which are based on the interviewee’s perspective, encouraged by interviewer’s probing
  • therefore it is virtually impossible to replicate these responses when testing for reliability - everyone’s answers in a unstructured interview may vary. this means that the data could be unreliable and unrepresentative of the general population
  • in addition, unstructured interviews also face a practical issue because they are time consuming to conduct. this is because these interviews are more concentrated on being like a conversation, while structured interviews are short and quick for gathering data
• ethical

  • one ethical disadvantage of unstructured interviews could be that it is a struggle to maintain the privacy of an interviewee
  • this could be because unstructured = very conversational and informal, which could cause the participants to feel uncomfortable with disclosing personal information because they don't want to give out their sensitive information
  • this means that participants may not want to take part in unstructured interviews which reduces the sample size, therefore limiting the amount of data gathered from the target population which can represent the general population. this causes unstructured interviews to be less representative
  • however, in unstructured interviews, the researcher has an opportunity to form a rapport with the participant. this could encourage them to give more in-depth data to improve the validity of the study, enabling more in depth conclusions to be drawn (interpretivists prefer)