Crafting Qualitative Research Tools: A Deep Dive into Interview Design

This essay discusses the importance of interviews as a critical tool in qualitative research, emphasizing the interviewer's role in designing questions tailored to the target audience. It compares interviews to surveys, highlighting the personalized nature of interviews and their potential for bias. The essay also touches on the benefits of using surveys, particularly surveymonkey.com, for efficient data collection and emphasizes the need for well-defined questions. It concludes that interviews, while time-consuming, are effective for gathering responses and forming opinions, and that survey methods are simple to use for collecting formal flow of information. Desklib provides similar solved assignments for students.

Running head: DESIGNING THE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH TOOLS
DESIGNING THE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH TOOLS

DESIGNING THE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH TOOLS
Interview
An interview may be considered to be one of the most critical tools in the context of
qualitative research. The interview provides an opportunity to the interviewer (the researcher in
the given context) to identify the interviewees and accordingly design the questions in order to
suit the mindset, tastes, and preferences of the targeted audiences and extract the best responses
out of them.
In my previous research, I used both the survey and interview as research tools to get my
responses. Both the tools are very helpful for gathering results for subsequent analysis and
evaluation. The survey gives me the possibility to gather opinion without being physically
present. On the other hand, the interview allows me to understand which questions and topics are
the most important for interviewees.
It may be stated that interview is a formalized process or tool in qualitative research that
focuses more on extracting required information from the targeted audience based on the
questionnaire prepared. However, there lies a thin line of demarcation between questionnaire and
interview in the sense that interview is more personalized form of research methodology than
questionnaire. It may also be observed that an interview is time consuming and associated with
risk of biasness. In other words, it may be established that the interview deals with public
psychology and hence is opinion-driven (Brace, 2018). A detailed open-ended interactive
interview helps the researcher to evaluate the findings and link the same to the research
objectives in the most efficient manner.
Finally, it may be noted that the interview method is widely used as the same is
considered to be easier and effective to gather the responses and form an opinion based on such
responses (Schuldt, Roh& Schwarz, 2015).
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DESIGNING THE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH TOOLS
References:
Brace, I. (2018). Questionnaire design: How to plan, structure and write survey material for
effective market research. Kogan Page Publishers.
Schuldt, J. P., Roh, S., & Schwarz, N. (2015). Questionnaire design effects in climate change
surveys: Implications for the partisan divide. The ANNALS of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 658(1), 67-85.
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