Balanced Value Impact Model

Interviews

An interview is a conversation in which the interviewer questions the interviewee in order to gain information and understanding on a defined topic.  Interviews can be formal or informal, structured or unstructured.  They can be conducted one-to-one or in groups, face to face or by telephone or online.   Interviews are time-intensive for the researcher, who may need to carry out a number of one-to-one interviews and would usually record and transcribe the contents. They permit the gathering of a wide range of qualitative data, and they can provide information about people’s motivations, feelings, attitudes, and what they remember.  To be most useful, interviews should be well-structured in advance, but should allow the discussion to be relatively free to get the best out of the subject.

The structured interview holds a kind of halfway position between surveys and focus groups, as it involves a one-to-one interview where the questions are pre-set in a survey style. The interview can range beyond the pre-set questions. All questions must be asked to allow for comparison of results, but the order can vary. While they are time consuming, they are an especially effective method for gaining opinions and providing comparable data from a range of interviewees, especially experts, policy makers, decision makers or funders. These can be most useful to Education and Inheritance values. The data collected is qualitative but may also include some quantitative information.

This page has paths: