Chapter 6
Contacting and Talking to Participants

Modified: 2007-03-01

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Structured and Unstructured Interviews: The interview technique involves orally asking questions and recording the answers. Interviews allow researchers to interact with participants and to explore psychologically interesting questions thoroughly. However, interviews take more time than other methods. Successful interviewing requires preparation and practice. If the questions are created in advance and the same questions are asked of each participant, the interviews are structured interviews. If the questions vary as a result of the interviewee’s responses, the interviews are unstructured interviews.

Example of Structured Inteview:

Unusual groups are a fruitful source for interview research. Campbell and Jones (2002) interviewed 10 world-class male wheelchair basketball players. The interviews focused on the sources of stress (both general and competition-related) experienced by these athletes. The interviews began with an introduction that set the context: the athletes’ experiences in their sport. The interview then moved to questions designed to help the athletes recall their wheelchair basketball experiences. Questions about both general and competition–related stress followed. The interview ended with questions about the interview itself. Interviews lasted as long as 150 minutes. All were tape recorded and transcribed. Each interviewee later verified the transcript for accuracy. The transcripts were analyzed with a technique called inductive content analysis. In this type of analysis, researchers independently read raw data transcripts searching for uniformities which are grouped into emergent themes. In the Campbell and Jones study, seven steps were used in data analysis:

  1. listening to the tapes and reading the transcripts for familiarization
  2. identifying quotations and paraphrasing to yield the raw data
  3. writing down each raw datum on a separate card
  4. grouping the raw data into higher and lower level themes
  5. checking for bias in the themes by comparing to other readers
  6. re–reading the transcripts to ensure all themes had been captured
  7. computing a frequency analysis
This analysis led to 156 raw data themes which were condensed into 10 higher–level themes related to stress: pre–event concerns, negative match preparations, on–court concerns, post–match performance concerns, negative aspects of match events, poor interaction and communication, negative coaching issues, relationship issues, demands of wheelchair basketball, and lack of disability awareness. Campbell and Jones found that many aspects of wheelchair basketball competition were stressful and that some of those stresses could come from competition while others came from the outside. Most of the stresses came from basketball but two non-basketball themes were also stressful—cost of the wheelchair and the public’s lack of disability awareness.

See Patton (2005) for description of the details of inductive content analysis.

Example of Unstructured Interview:

Johnson (1998) conducted unstructured interviews with 10 psychiatric patients (5 males and 5 females) who had been restrained for therapeutic reasons. (Therapeutic restraint is belting a patient to a bed to prevent self-injury.) Johnson began each interview by asking patients to recall the experience of restraint. After that opening question, she allowed the patients to speak their minds. Following the interviews, verbatim transcripts were examined for emerging themes. Two specific themes, power and powerlessness, were selected for further analysis. Patients under restraint did not feel safe and protected, nor did they see being restrained as a form of therapy. Instead, they saw restraint as the consequence of rule breaking or disobedience.

Focus groups are a kind of small group interview. Typically, researchers recruit participants, convene a meeting, and conduct structured or unstructured interviews with the whole group. Outside of colleges and universities, marketers and manufacturers often use focus group interviews to test consumer reactions to products and advertisements. Focus groups can also be considered collaborative research because the groups often develop a group identity and the members provide information not easily obtained from single-person interviews. Two differences between focus groups and other interviews are the number of interviewees and the social nature of the setting.

Examples of Focus Groups

Web Pages

Conducting Primary Research
Owl site at Purdue covers primary research (research you collect yourself)
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/559/01/

General Guidelines for Conducting Interviews
Tutorial on interviews covers preparation, types of interviews, questions, and more.
http://www.managementhelp.org/evaluatn/intrview.htm

Structured Behavioral Interviews
Government page discusses types of questions and give examples.
http://www.hr.state.az.us/staffingandrecruitment/structuredbehavioralinterviews.htm

Qualitative Methodologies
Tutorial on unstructured interviews and focus groups.
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/DeafStudiesTeaching/dissert/Qualitative%20Methodologies.htm

Using Interview in Research
Student handout covers structured and unstructured interviews and gives advice on how to conduct them.
http://www.rider.edu/~suler/interviews.html

Focus Groups
http://www.ergolabs.com/focus_group.htm
Defines focus group and lists some of its limitations.

Basics of Conducting Focus Groups
Tutorial tells how to prepare and conduct focus group interviews.
http://www.managementhelp.org/evaluatn/focusgrp.htm

Wikipedia on Focus Groups
Wikipedia’s page cover traditional and online focus group research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_group

Focus Groups
Online article covers focus groups, their potential and limitations, the role of the moderator, and ethical issues.
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru/SRU19.html

 

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