[Instructor] This is the second and final part
of the qualitative research lecture for this week.
I wanna talk to you now about three factors
of how you design your interview guide.
What kinds of questions do you ask?
The first one is the structure,
and the first option of these is a structured interview.
In here you have a precise script.
You read the questions word for word
always in the same order.
You have no deviations, and because of this,
you'll get more predictable and therefore reliable answers.
At the other end of the spectrum is unstructured,
where it's much more freeform.
You just cover the key points.
You can drop and add questions.
And in this way because you're adapting it
to what the respondent is saying,
and sort of allowing the interview to follow the thread
of the conversation,
you'll probably get more valid answers.
As a rule of thumb,
we generally tend to use a structured interview
if there are multiple interviewers.
So an example is this class when you'll be,
each of you will be going out and doing interviews,
and we will use a structured interview,
not an unstructured interview.
And why do you think that is?
The reason is that
with lots and lots of different interviewers
we can't be sure that the key questions are asked
that they were asked in the same way.
So we tend to stick to a stricter script
when there are multiple interviewers.
Whereas if there's only one,
you have a little bit more leeway to use less structure.
In some ways, the best of both worlds
is the in-between state,
where you used semi-structured interviews.
And these are probably the most commonly type
of interviews in social science research.
And again, this is sort of an in-between case
where there's some structure
which ensures that some, you know,
the key points and key questions are hit,
so you get reliable data.
Yet there also allows for some flexibility
and may allow for some new information
that the structured questions didn't elicit
and therefore also get valid information.
Here are some basic tips.
Try to set an easy conversational tone.
Set the subject at ease.
Let the responses shape the next questions.
Have lots of probes like, "How does that work?"
"Tell me more."
"What's an example?"
And like almost anything else in life,
the best way to get better at doing interviews is practice.
The next consideration
is whether you're having open-end questions
or closed-ended questions.
Usually in interviews we asked open-ended questions.
Closed-ended question is like a yes-no,
or where you're asking them to choose
from a set of answers that you provide.
So that's more like a survey.
And an open-ended
tends to just let them answer in their own words
and give the answer that they think of.
So think about what will give you more reliable
and what will give you more valid answers.
Here is the way it works.
Closed ended has more reliable
and open-ended has more valid.
And if you don't understand why that is so,
let's discuss it in the class meeting, the discussions.
The next consideration is the order of questions.
Now note that these may be in conflict,
but here are three really important principles.
First general to specific,
most important to least important,
and safest to riskiest.
And we'll talk in class, in our class meeting,
how that works and why that is the right order.
But feel free to think about why that is so.
As we learned very early on
in our human inquiry and science session,
taking notes is important.
That you need to record it.
That you can't just trust your memory.
And it's very important to take notes in real time.
And then once you are done with the interview,
go back and sort of rewrite, revise, reorganize them,
just like you would during a class.
So yeah, I think that's a good thing to to do
when you take class notes
is like write down things on the fly
and then go back and revise and reorganize them.
Again, it's important to take lots of notes.
And as with anything else,
the best way to get better at it is to practice.
So what are the strengths and weaknesses
of qualitative methods?
The strengths is it's flexible.
So these, you can ask different questions
to different people.
You get great depth of answer,
that they can go into as much depth as they would want to.
And you get very valid responses
because they are putting it in their own words.
The weaknesses is in most cases,
no sort of statistical analysis or inference can be done.
There may be a lack of breadth that because of time
you may not be able to sort of cover all possible questions.
And it tends to be not as reliable
because you're not just having them pick answers
off of a sheet of paper.
So again, they're valid
because they're firsthand direct accounts.
They'll probably tell you things
that you would not have thought of.
That if you had a more reliable approach
that you might have missed something important.
And as we learned in mixed methods discussions
it can inform future inquiry.
There are ways to overcome the lack of reliability.
So because it's very personal,
it's subject to the researcher's bias
and to the respondent's biases,
and it very much just reflect their own perspectives.
So you can address this first
by being aware of your own bias,
by being reflexive as we learned about very early on.
And it can, very often it helps to use comparisons
with specificity.
So it's much more, much better account
to name the things that the person does.
So I talk about here that Interviewee A, a senior,
was able to name key energies saving steps but B could not.
And A was familiar.
And by being specific like this, and especially,
as we'll learn, adding some key quotations,
it sort of avoids the, "Take my word for it."
That that's a criticism of qualitative work
is it's, "Well, that's just your opinion of what they said."
So speaking of which,
these are some of the steps that you can take
to provide evidence of rigor of qualitative methods.
First, did you do a good job on the lit review?
Did you build upon prior studies
and show how your work addresses a gap in the existing work?
Next, does your sample make sense?
Did you collect data from a broad array?
Are you clear about what your sampling method was
and why you did what you did in the analysis?
Are you transparent about your codes?
So when we're gonna learn how to code data,
are you upfront and transparent about that?
And in many cases, it's good to have multiple coders,
so several researchers looking at the same data set,
and see if you're seeing the same thing.
Again, really addressing this reliability
by having multiple coders and are they saying,
I mean, seeing the same thing?
And finally, are you transparent in the reporting?
And does the voice of the respondent come through?
Do you have good quotations that really sum up a theme?
Can you sort of hear, maybe in a sense, the voice
of the respondent when you read the results?
So here are the key takeaways for qualitative research.
That it's part of mixed methods.
We talked about the balance
between the insider and outsider view.
Talked a bit about grounded theory.
How do we structure our question and options?
And what are the strengths and weaknesses
of valid versus reliable?
This is the end of the second and final part
of qualitative research.
And so make sure that you do the assessment
before we discuss it in class.
Thank you.