RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

354 INTERVIEWS
hypothesis-testing, whether they seek description
or interpretation, or whether they are largely
cognitive-focused or emotion-focused. A major
difference appears to lie in the degree of structure
in the interview, which, itself, reflects the purposes
of the interview, for example, to generate numbers
of respondents’ feelings about a given issue or
to indicate unique, alternative feelings about a
particular matter. Lincoln and Guba (1985: 269)
suggest that the structured interview is useful when
researchers are aware of what they do not know and
therefore are in a position to frame questions that
will supply the knowledge required, whereas the
unstructured interview is useful when researchers
are not aware of what they do not know, and
therefore, rely on the respondents to tell them!
The issue here is of ‘fitness for purpose’;
the more one wishes to gain comparable
data – across people, across sites – the more
standardized and quantitative one’s interview
tends to become; the more one wishes to
acquire unique, non-standardized, personalized
information about how individuals view the world,
the more one veers towards qualitative, openended,
unstructured interviewing. Indeed, this is
true not simply of interviews but of their written
counterpart – questionnaires. Oppenheim (1992:
86) indicates that standardization should refer
to stimulus equivalence, i.e. that every respondent
should understand the interview question in the
same way, rather than replicating the exact
wording, as some respondents might have difficulty
with, or interpret very differently, and perhaps
irrelevantly, particular questions. (He also adds
that as soon as the wording of a question is
altered, however minimally, it becomes, in effect,
adifferentquestion!)
Oppenheim (1992: 65) suggests that exploratory
interviews are designed to be essentially heuristic
and seek to develop hypotheses rather than to
collect facts and numbers. He notes that these
frequently cover emotionally loaded topics and,
hence, require skill on the part of the interviewer
to handle the interview situation, enabling
respondents to talk freely and emotionally and
to have candour, richness, depth, authenticity and
honesty about their experiences.
Morrison (1993: 34–6) sets out five continua
of different ways of conceptualizing interviews.
At one end of the first continuum are numbers,
statistics, objective facts, quantitative data; at
the other end are transcripts of conversations,
comments, subjective accounts, essentially wordbased
qualitative data.
At one end of the second continuum are
closed questions, multiple choice questions where
respondents have to select from a given,
predetermined range of responses that particular
response which most accurately represents what
they wish to have recorded for them; at the
other end of the continuum are much more openended
questions which do not require the selection
from a given range of responses – respondents can
answer the questions in their own way and in
their own words, i.e. the research is responsive
to participants’ own frames of reference and
response.
At one end of the third continuum is a desire to
measure responses, to compare one set of responses
with another, to correlate responses, to see how
many people said this, how many rated a particular
item as such-and-such; at the other end of the
continuum is a desire to capture the uniqueness of
aparticularsituation,personorprogramme–what
makes it different from others, i.e. to record the
quality of a situation or response.
At one end of the fourth continuum is a
desire for formality and the precision of numbers
and prescribed categories of response where the
researcher knows in advance what is being sought;
at the other end is a more responsive, informal
intent where what is being sought is more
uncertain and indeterminate – we know what we
are looking for only when we have found it! The
researcher goes into the situation and responds to
what emerges.
At one end of the fifth continuum is the attempt
to find regularities – of response, opinions etc. – in
order to begin to make generalizations from the
data, to describe what is happening; at the other
end is the attempt to portray and catch uniqueness,
the quality of a response, the complexity of a
situation, to understand why respondents say what
they say, and all of this in their own terms.