RESEARCH METHOD

Research Method

Research Method

Introduction

Interviewing is an age-old technique, for people have long asked questions to find out information. Opinion polls have long relied on interview responses, and today interviewing is a common research tool in public relations, marketing, therapy, and academic inquiry. Further, although interviewing is used in quantitative research (e.g., survey interviews), it is more common as a qualitative technique (Lindlof, 2007, 63).

Survey interviewing is typically a formal, standardized conversation between a person asking questions (the interviewer) and a person giving answers to those questions (the respondent). The respondents are selected because they belong to a population of interest.

Constructivism and Interviewing

In terms of methods, constructivist qualitative research studies typically emphasize participant observation and interviewing for data generation as the researcher aims to understand a phenomenon from the perspective of those experiencing it (Polkinghorne, 2008, 1). The researcher's understanding is co-constructed with that of the participants through their mutual interaction within the research setting and dialogic interaction through researcher-initiated data generation efforts such as interviewing.

The developing criteria for determining the trustworthiness of interpretations produced within the constructivist paradigm provides some specificity to how one may conduct and digest research in this paradigm (Phillips, 2006, 10). The preceding historical discussion and delineation of constructivist theories provides possible conceptual frameworks to guide and understand research in this paradigm. For example, phenomenology, adapted and developed by contemporary qualitative researchers, is a common methodological framework for constructivist research studies. Sociocultural learning theory is an oft-cited theoretical framework in constructivist educational research. For example, (Mertens, 2008, 52) described the nature of preschool and kindergarten children's talk surrounding voluntary art activities in an art classroom using a phenomenological methodology in that they observed and recorded students' speech and drawing acts within the specific social context of an art classroom and reflected on what these acts might mean for the role of speech in early childhood artistic expression. They used the theories of both Vygotsky and Piaget to understand students' use of language in this specific context and area of cognitive development.

The population can be very broad (e.g. residents of a city or state, registered voters) or very narrow (e.g. people who have been diagnosed with a particular disease; females who smoke cigarettes, have less than a high school education, and watch the local news on a specified television station). In addition to asking questions, the interviewers may also play other roles, such as gaining initial cooperation from the respondents or showing respondents how to answer self-administered questionnaires on paper or by computer. While some survey data may be collected by self-administration (e.g. mail or Internet-based surveys), many surveys, particularly long, complicated ones, require the use of an interviewer. Thus interviewing is an important aspect of survey research.

Why Interviews are Used

According to (Montana, 2008), “in qualitative research, one interviews people to understand their perspectives on a scene, to retrieve experiences from the past, to gain expert insight or information, to obtain descriptions of events or scenes that are normally unavailable for observation, to foster trust, to understand ...