What are reliability weaknesses of unstructured interviews?
What are reliability weaknesses of unstructured interviews?
As an empirical field of study, sociology focuses on several social problems and formulate the data relating to them by performing several data collection techniques. It uses scientific principles and statistical tools to carry out the research. It also performs several-validity and reliability tests to get the desired results from the research performed. Several methods like the interview method, survey method, etc., are used to carry out the research.
Unstructured interview methods are used to carry out the research that requires a large sample and get the respondents' opinion-based responses. This method is used to carry out the research based on the sensitive topics that require the respondent's personal life experiences. The unstructured interviews lack the reliability in the data that is obtained through interviews. Usually, the reliability of the data is tested through several methods like test-retest, split half, parallel form, internal consistency. In the case of unstructured interviews, these methods are not possible due to the lack of a series of designing the questions posed to the respondent. So, it leads to several reliability weaknesses like,
1. The interview doesn't have structured questions, which leads to getting a vast amount of data. The data obtained will be different from one individual to another due to the uniqueness of each interview.
2. The interview may miss the data that the researcher actually requires to extract from the respondent. The respondent may not give the desired answers fro the questions posed to him.
3. The interview may deviate to other aspects of the respondents' activities, which misses the interview's actual requirements. This leads to the wastage of time of the researcher.
4. The researcher may also have the data that comprises the researcher's subjective opinions, which lacks authenticity. This will also lead to the increase of the sample size in order to get the required data for the research problem.
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