Interviews (methods in context)

• Issues sociologists may use interviews to study in education

  • Pupil subcultures
  • Pupils' experience of health and sex education
  • Class, ethnicity and language
  • Gender identity and the male gaze
  • Class and parental choice of schools
• Practical issues when interviewing young people

  • Less articulate or more reluctant to talk
  • Not understand long, complex questions or some abstract concepts
  • Have a more limited vocabulary and use words incorrectly or differently from adults, e.g. slang
  • Have a shorter attention span and poorer memory retrieval than adults
  • Read body language differently from adults
• Unstructured interviews


  Allow the interviewer more scope to clear up misunderstandings by re-wording questions or explaining their meaning
• Young children tend to be more literal minded and often pay attention to unexpected details in questions, and may use a different logic from adult interviewers
• Training therefore needs to be more thorough for someone interviewing children, which adds to the costs of the research
• Interviews may be more successful than written questionnaires as a method of obtaining valid answers from young people, since they tend to have better verbal than literacy skills
• The content of the interview may get around most pupils and teachers after only a few interviews have taken place, which may influence the responses given by later interviewees, thus reducing the validity of the data
• If interviews are conducted on school premises this may affect how comfortable pupil or parent feels, as the school and the classroom represent higher status and authority
• Teachers may be put off by the fear of colleagues or the head overhearing, especially if the questions are of a sensitive nature
• Unstructured interviews can often take an hour or more to conduct
• Interviews with teachers would probably have to take place outside school hours if conducted during school time, due to interruptions and other distractions
• Parents often have busy work and parenting schedules and may only cooperate in lengthy interviews if they can see some benefit to their children's education
• For young children in particular, there is also the ethical issue that they may be unsettled by strange situations such as an interview, so researchers need to take particular care that the interview does not distress them
• Structured interviews


  Produce reliable data because they are standardised: each interview is conducted in precisely the same way, with the same questions, in the same order, tone of voice and so on
• Structured interviews may not produce valid data, since young people are unlikely to respond favourably to such a formal style
• Unstructured interviews


  Maintain a relaxed atmosphere by nodding, smiling and making eye contact
• This personal interviewing style cannot easily be standardised, so different interviewers would be likely to obtain very different results, reducing the reliability and comparability of the findings
• Schools are hierarchical institutions and this can cause problems when seeking to interview teachers or pupils, as the lower down the hierarchy the interviewee is, the more approvals that have to be obtained
• Schools may be reluctant to allow sociologists to conduct interviews during lesson time because of the disruption it causes, or because they object to the researcher's chosen topic
• Parental permission may also be required to interview children, and the likelihood of this being granted varies according to the subject of research
• If the researcher can obtain official support for the study then the hierarchical nature of school may work in their favour, as heads can instruct teachers to release pupils from class for interviews
• Power and status inequalities


  Can affect the outcome of interviews, as interviewees with less power may lie, exaggerate, conceal information or seek to please when answering questions
• Pupils may see the interviewer as a 'teacher in disguise', which may affect the validity of the data as they may seek to win the teacher's approval by giving untrue but socially acceptable answers
• Pupils are accustomed to adults 'knowing better' and so may defer to them in interviews, for example by changing their original answer when the question is repeated
• Working-class parents may perceive the interviewer as having a higher status than them and may feel that the questions are patronising or intrusive
• When interviewing middle-class teachers, power and status inequalities are likely to be less pronounced
• Unstructured interviews


  May be more suitable for overcoming barriers of power and status inequality, as their informality can put young interviewees at their ease and establish rapport more easily
• Group interviews with pupils can reveal the interactions between them, but peer pressure may influence individuals to give answers that conform to the group's values rather than express their true opinions
• The free-flowing nature of group interviews makes it impossible to standardise the questions, reducing the reliability of the method and the comparability of findings
• Group interviews can create a safe peer environment and reproduce the small group settings that young people are familiar with in classroom work, reducing the power imbalance between adult interviewer and young interviewee