Structured Interview Essay

Q) Examine the reasons why some sociologists choose to use structured interviews when conducting their research.
A) A structured interview involves one person asking another person a list of questions about a carefully-selected topic. Also the person interviewing can explain things to participants if they don’t understand the question. Moreover structured interviews are like questionnaires the interviewer is given strict instructions on how to carry out the interview and the interview is carried out in the same standardised way each time with the same questions same order and same tone of voice. Questionnaires and interviews both involve asking people a set of prepared questions.in both cases they are mainly close ended questions with pre coded answers.
There are many practical advantages in the case of structured interviews for example training interviewers is straight forward and inexpensive since all they really need to do is follow a set of instructions also research that uses structured interviews tend to cover a large amount of people with a limited amount of resources because they are quick and cheap to administer. Structured interviews are very suitable for gathering straightforward information and the results are easily quantified because the questions are close ended and the answers are pre coded.
Structured interviews have many strengths and weaknesses. A strength of structured interviews is it enables the researcher to examine the level of understanding a respondent has about a particular question. Also structured interviews can be used as a powerful form of formative assessment. It can be used to explore how a respondent feels about a particular topic. A weakness of structured interviews is that there is a possibility that the presence of the researcher can influence the way a respondent answers the questions and that can bias the responses an example of this is a aggressive interviewer can intimidate the respondent into giving answers that don’t