Methods in Context – Interviews
PRACTICAL ISSUES:
Young peoples’ linguistic and intellectual skills are less developed, which may pose problems.
Young interviewees may:
Be less articulate and 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.
Difficulty keeping to the point.
This therefore may cause invalid data which is an issue to the researcher.
As young people often have better verbal skills than literacy skills though, they’re more likely to find an interview easier than a questionnaire.
Because of informal communication channels the content of the interview (possibly an inaccurate version) may get around pupils and teachers after only a few interviews.
This will affect the data by causing demand characteristics, specifically social desirability bias in this case.
If the interview is conducted on school premises it will affect how comfortable the pupil or parent will feel. Classrooms represent higher status and authority.
Teachers may also be put off because they don’t want to say anything that will affect their careers.
Problems that might arise from conducting the interviews in school are needing gatekeepers’ permission and a DBS to get into the school, and pupils might be affected by peers.
The fact they’re time consuming also causes an issue as they’re an interference with the school day.
Parents have a busy work and parenting schedule so will only take part if they see a benefit to their child’s education.
Children might be unsettled by the unusual situation of an interview so extra care is needed.
The gender or ethnicity of the interviewer might have an effect on the results because of the cause of demand characteristics due to the unnatural situation, or the more similarity there is the more open and comfortable the situation may be.
SOURCE (PRACTICAL):
Powney and Watts note that 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.
THEORETICAL ISSUES:
Reliability and validity:
Structured interviews are reliable because there’s standardised questions which are closed.
Structured interviews may not be valid because the formality may push people into ‘being right’, there’s not enough options or an option for someone, the interviewer can’t explain or change questions, can’t ask follow-up questions, creates limited quantitative data.
Unstructured interviews are different because follow-up questions can be asked, things can be explained, they’re more informal and relaxed, have open questions, create qualitative data with extra detail, can ask different questions.
Access and response rate:
Powney and Watts – the lower down the hierarchy the interviewee is the more difficult it is to obtain permission.
Schools might not want the interviews to happen in lesson time due to interference with the school day.
Additionally:
Conducting interviews after school hours is a problem.
Parental permission to interview pupils is dependent on the topic.
Gaining head teacher approval for the study can get rid of consent issues.
If interviewees have less power than the interviewer, they may see it as being in their own interests to lie, exaggerate, conceal information or seek to please when answering questions. May also be less confident and less articulate.
This therefore makes the data less valid.
Interviewer as a teacher in disguise:
Interviewers are usually adults and children may see them as authority figures.
This is even more likely in educational research carried out in a school.
Bell notes that pupils may see the interviewer as a ‘teacher in disguise’.
This therefore may prompt socially acceptable answers because it causes classroom-like behaviour; pupils may feel like they’re being tricked.
Children may defer their answer to the interviewers because they don’t know what the question means, they’re confused, the interviewer is an authority figure and they want to conform, very young children are very likely to just agree.
When interviewing working-class parents there may be similar issues, but these are lessened when interviewing middle class teachers.
Improving the validity of interviews with pupils:
Greene and Hogan propose 5 ways of improving validity in interviews:
Use open-ended questions rather than closed-ended.
Don’t interrupt children’s answers.
Tolerate long pauses to allow children to think about what they want to say.
Recognise that children are more suggestible and so it’s particularly important to avoid asking leading questions.
Avoid repeating questions, since this makes children change their first answer because they think it was wrong.
SOURCES (THEORETICAL):
Bentley began each interview by showing participants a ‘jokey’ image of her fooling around with her daughter.
During the interview, she maintained a relaxed atmosphere by nodding, smiling and making eye contact.
Field’s study of pupils’ experience of sex and health education in schools had a relatively high refusal rate of 29%, mainly because of parents withholding consent.
Labov found when using formal interview techniques to study the language of black American children that they appeared tongue-tied and ‘linguistically deprived’.
However, adopting a more relaxed, informal style – the interviewer sitting on the floor, the child allowed to have a friend present – allowed the children to speak more freely, showing they were competent speakers.
GROUP INTERVIEWS WITH PUPILS:
Advantages:
Peers – confidence.
Group interviews have a free flowing nature – more conversation-like.
Safe environment.
Interactions.
Disadvantages:
Peers – peer pressure.
Group interviews have a free flowing nature – go off-topic.
Interactions – power and status.
SOURCE (GROUP):
Willis’ study of ‘lads’ – anti-school subcultures.
Gained perspective on why these children chose to rebel against school authority – e.g Eddie: ‘The teachers think they’re high and mighty ‘cos they’re teachers, but they’re nobody really, they’re just ordinary people, ain’t they’.