Research Methodology

Interview
MBA
Part III
Effective way Involves verbal
of gathering and non-verbal
information communications

INTERVIEW

Can be conducted
face to face, by telephone,
online or through mail
 Interview Method

• The Interview is referred to as a form filled in during a personal interview in

which both the interviewers as well as the respondent are present. It contains a set
of questions which are asked and then the columns are filled in by an interviewer
in a face to face situation
• It may be defined as a two way systematic conversation between an investigator
and an informant, initiated for obtaining information relevant to a specific study
•
• Interview is the verbal conversation between two people with the
objective of collecting relevant information for the purpose of
research.
• According to Monette ‘an interview involves an interviewer reading
questions to respondents and recording their answers’.
• According to Burns , ‘an interview is a verbal interchange, often face
to face though the telephone may be used, in which an interviewer
tries to elicit information, beliefs or opinions from another person’.
Interview Method
• Interviews are probably the most widely used technique for collecting
data
• It is one of the oldest method of data collection
• They permit the interviewer to ask the respondent direct questions.
• Further probing and clarification is possible as the interview proceeds.
• This flexibility is invaluable for gaining private views and feelings
about the organization and exploring new issues that emerge during
the interview.
Interview method
• To complete interview method in research
presence of two or more than two persons
face to face relationship
specific subject
collection of data
• Asking the question  interviewer/investigator
• Responding the question  informant/respondent/interviewee
• General, investigator asks the question, sometime respondent might ask the question
• Collection information: not only verbal information; include
gesture/feelings/emotions/attitudes/rate of speech
 Characteristics of Interview
1. The participants - the interviewer and the respondent - are strangers. Hence, the
investigator has to get himself introduced to the respondent in an appropriate
manner
2. The relationship between the participants and the interviewer is a transitory one. It
has a fixed beginning and termination points.
3. Interview is not a mere casual conversational exchange, but a conversation with a
specific purpose, viz., obtaining information relevant to a study.
4. Interview is a mode of obtaining verbal answers to questions put verbally.
5. The interaction between the interviewer and the respondent need not necessarily
be on a face-to-face basis, because interview can be conducted over the telephone
also.
6. Although interview is usually a conversation between two persons, it need not be
limited to a single respondent. It can also be conducted with a group of persons
7. Interviewing is a flexible psychological process.
Steps To An Effective Interview
Prepare your interview schedule

Select your subjects/ key informants

Conduct the interview

Analyze and interpret data collected from the interview

 Methods of conducting an Personal Interview
• Preparation –The interviewer should keep the copies of interview
schedule/guide (as the case may be) ready for use. He should also
have the list of names and addresses of respondents
• Introduction: An introduction involves the interviewer identifying
himself by giving him his name, purpose and sponsorship if any. An
introductory letter goes a long way in conveying the study’s legitimacy.
• Developing rapport - Before starting the research interview, the
interviewer should establish a friendly relationship with the
respondent. This is described as "rapport“. It means establishing a
relationship of confidence and understanding between the interviewer
and the respondent
Methods of conducting an Personal Interview
• Carrying the interview forward: After establishing rapport, the technical
task of asking questions from the interview schedule starts.
• Probing: is the technique of encouraging the respondents to answer
completely, freely and relevantly.
• Recording: The interviewer can either write the response at the time of
interview or after the interview. In certain cases, where the respondent
allows for it, audio or visual aids can be used to record answers.
• Closing: After the interview, interviewer should thank the respondent
and once again assure him about the worth of his answers and the
confidentiality of the same.
 Interview Problems
1. Inadequate response
2. Interviewer's bias
3. Non-response
4. Non-availability
5. Refusal
6. Incapacity or inability
 Advantages of Interview
1. Depth and detail of information can be secured.
2. Quality information
3. Other supplemental information
4. The accuracy can be checked
5. Provide direct feedback to the respondent
6. flexible and adaptable to individual situations
7. Control process
8. Applicable in complex situation
9. Use of diagrams and graphs
 Disadvantage of Interview
1. The interview results are often adversely affected by interviewer's
mode of asking questions and interactions
2. Certain types of personal and financial information may be refused in
face-to-face interview
3. Interview poses the problem of recording information obtained from
the respondents
4. Lack of training for the person who conduct interview.
5. Interview is costly both in terms of money and time.
6. The quality of data depends upon the quality of the interaction.
7. The quality of data depends upon the quality of the interviewer.
8. The quality of data may vary when may interviewers are used.
9. The researcher may introduce his/her bias.
 Requirement for Successful Interview
1. Data availability: The needed- information should be available with
the respondent.
2. Role perception: The respondent should understand his role and
know what is required of him.
3. Role of Interviewer: The interviewer should also know his role. He
should establish a permissive atmosphere and encourage frank and
free conversation.
4. Respondent's motivation: The respondent should be willing to
respond and give accurate answer. This depends partly on the
interviewer's approach and skill
Principles of interviewing
• Plan the interview process
• Detail knowledge of subject matter
• Determine the respondents
• Prepare time and place
• Familiar with various interviewing process
• Check the accuracy rate
• Make written report
• Good way of starting interview
• Not be passive listener but active
• Capable to handle every situation
• Note only appropriate answer
• Record the interview process
• Closing interview
• Know about custom and manner
Types of interview method
• According to formality or structure (Formal vs Informal/structured vs
unstructured/ directed vs non-directed)
• According to number (individual vs grouped)
• According to the period of contact (short vs. long)
• According to subject matter (Qualitative, Quantitative, Mixed)
• According to purpose (Diagnostic, Treatment, Research Curiosity,
Depth etc.)
• Indirect Oral Interview
• Telephonic interview
Structured or Directive or Formal Interview
 This is an interview made with a detailed standardized schedule.
 Set of pre-determined questions
 The same questions are put to all the respondents and in the same order.
 Each question is asked in the same way in each interview.
 Not having facility to increase or decrease or erase questions
 This type of interview is used for large-scale formalized surveys.
 Advantage: more economic, time saving, only get standardized information,
not problem for coding
 Disadvantage: loss of spontaneous information, minimize respondents
views
Unstructured or Non-directive or Informal Interview

• The interviewer encourages the respondent to talk freely about a

given topic with a minimum of prompting or guidance.
• In this type of interview, a detailed pre-planned schedule is not used.
Only a broad interview guide is used.
• Respondents have freedom to answer the questions
• This interviewing is more useful in case studies rather than in surveys.
• Advantage: gather missing information, gather supplementary
information, friendly behavior, secret information,
• Disadvantage: time consuming, difficult for coding, respondents bias
Others
• Individual: One person in one time, face to face relationship, collect
targeted information, chance of getting secret information, extra time
needed, extra resources needed
• Grouped: Many persons in one sitting, save time and energy, only
collect general information
• Short contact interview: single sitting, small duration
• Prolonged contact interview: long sitting, multiple sitting
Others
Focused interview: This is a semi-structured interview where the investigator attempts
to focus the discussion on the actual effects of a given experience to which the
respondents have been exposed. The interview is focused on the subjective
experiences of the respondent, i.e., his attitudes, and emotional responses regarding
the situation under study.
Clinical interview: This is similar to the focused interview but with a subtle difference.
While the focused interview is concerned with the effects of a specific experience,
clinical interview is concerned with broad underlying feelings or motivations or with
the course of the individual's life experiences.
Depth interview: This is an intensive and searching interview aiming at studying the
respondent's opinion, emotions or convictions on the basis of an interview guide. This
is generally a lengthy procedure designed to encourage free expression of his/her
feeling, emotion, his knowledge about particular area of study.
Indirect Oral Interview
• Indirect approach of collection of data
• Witness or third party, who have detailed knowledge
• Should be unbiased
• Use: commission and enquiry
• Advantage: direct contact is not necessary, less expensive and time
saving, no bias of investigator, can gather negative aspect also
• Disadvantage: Depend upon witness, information can be twisted, can
not get depth and real information
 Telephone Interview
• Telephone interview the information is collected from the
respondent by asking him questions on the phone is called as
telephone interview. The combination of telephone and computer
has made this method even more popular.
• Advantage: direct method, save time, money & labor, less
embarrassed for respondent, high contact rate, recall facility, wide
area, repeated interview
• Disadvantage: only for telephonic facility, limited time to response,
biasness of investigator as well as respondent, not cover every
sector, not supplementary information
SURVEY METHOD
Survey Method of Data Collection
 Survey means gathering information through respondents for any pre-established research
objective.
 In most of the scientific research, this information is obtained from a representative sample
of the population.
 Like any other method of data collection, the survey methods have several advantages and
disadvantages.
 The first advantage of the survey lies in the fact that this method gives an opportunity to the
researcher to collect data at one time.
 The second advantage is its ability to generate some standardized information as the same
questionnaire is administered to different respondents more often on same time.
 Third advantage of the survey method is its suitability for data coding, tabulation, analysis,
and interpretation.
 Fourth advantage is the ease in administering the questionnaire.
Survey Method of Data Collection (Cont)

 The survey method of data collection also has some disadvantages.

 The major disadvantage is to handle the unwillingness of the respondents to provide
responses.
 Second disadvantage of the survey methods is the fact that the individual
characteristics of the interviewer or the way of presentation of the questionnaire or
the way of asking questions makes a big difference in getting the responses.
 In spite of these limitations, this is a widely used technique of data generation in the
field of business research.
A Classification of Survey Methods
1. Personal Interview

 As the name indicates, personal interview is a method of data collection through

contacting a respondent personally.
 Naturally, there may be different ways of contacting the subjects (respondents).
 These ways can be classified on the basis of the respondents to be contacted and the
means to contact them.
 Accordingly, personal interviews can be broadly classified into six categories: door-to-
door interview, mall intercept interview, office interview, self-administered
questionnaire, omnibus survey, and computer-assisted interviews.
1(a) Door-to-Door Interview

 Door-to-door interview is a traditional technique of getting the responses from the

respondents at their home.
 In this technique, the interviewer contacts the respondents at their home in person and
seeks a face-to-face interview.
 In some cases like demonstration of product at home with interview, in-home product
tests and conduction of long in-depth interviews, door-to-door interview technique is
the only viable alternative a researcher has got.
1(b) Mall Intercept Interview

 In mall intercept interview technique, a respondent who actually is a visitor to a

shopping mall is intercepted by the interviewer for obtaining responses.
 Mall intercept interview technique is easy to execute, but it also has some major
disadvantages.
 Principally, the response rate is assumed to be higher, but in practice the response rate
happens to be very low.
 The reason is very simple. The respondents come to the malls for shopping and not for
answering the questions.
 In mall intercept interview technique, there is a great possibility that the interviewer will
try to contact a respondent who looks friendly, and this results in a respondent
selection bias.
 Finally, interview in a crowded place sometimes generates a great difficulty for the
researcher.
1(c) Office Interviews

 An interviewer conducts an office interview at the work place of the respondents.

 When the research objective is to unfold the consumer attitude of any industrial
product or services, then probably home interview technique will not be able to
generate accurate responses.
 Office interviews are usually conducted after taking prior appointment from the
interviewee.
 In an organization, various categories of employees can provide a variety of information.
 A researcher can focus on these different categories of employees to generate the
responses in the light of a specific research objective.
1(d) Self-Administered Questionnaire

 In self-administered questionnaire, no interviewer is involved.

 A series of questions are presented to the respondents without the intervention of the
interviewer.
 While absence of intervention of the interviewer makes this interview technique
biasfree from the interviewer’s angle on the one hand, a personal clarification to some
of the questions of the survey by the interviewer is completely missing on the other.
1(f) Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI)
Techniques

 CAPI is a type of personal interview technique where the respondents provide their
response inputs directly through a computer terminal by using a keyboard or a mouse.
 There are several advantages of this survey technique. Graphical display associated
with the question presents a good opportunity for the respondents to understand the
questions well.
 This technique also allows catering to the response time a respondent is taking to
answer a question.
 The major disadvantage of this method is the lack of personal touch to the process,
which can be provided by the interviewer in a personal interview.
Table 7.2: Advantages and disadvantages of different personal interview techniques
2. Telephone Interview

 As the number of telephones increase, it might be expected that the telephone

interviews would assume greater role as an approach to data collection (Ibsen &
Ballweg, 1974).
 Few researchers (e.g. Wilson, 2007) argue that the procedure of data collection through
telephone is both reliable and valid compared with the collection through mail
questionnaire.
 Telephone interviewing technique can be classified into four categories: personal
interview using telephone, fax survey, voice mail survey, and computer-assisted
telephone interviewing (CATI).
2 (a). Personal Interview Using Telephone
 In personal interview using telephone, the interviewers ask a series of questions to the
respondents and record the responses on the questionnaire papers.
 As compared with the personal interview technique, the telephone interviews are cost
efficient as these eliminate the cost incurred in travelling.
 One of the serious limitations of telephone personal interview is the inability of the
interviewer to have face-to-face communication with the respondent.
 Another limitation of this type of interviewing technique is the “non-response” of the
respondent.
 Explaining some difficult questions is equally difficult for the interviewer.
 The telephone surveys are also unable to deal with a situation when a product
demonstration is extremely important.
2 (b). Fax Survey
 To get a quick response, the researchers generally use the fax survey method.
 This is a relative advantage of this method over mail survey method as the latter requires more
time to get the response.
 Traditionally, fax messages are treated as urgent, and there is a possibility that the response may
be speedy, which is not valid for the mail survey.
 There are some disadvantages to the fax survey method. After the widespread penetration of
computers with e-mail facility, the use of fax machine as a survey instrument is reducing.
 In some cases, the quality of the questionnaire received by the respondents happens to be poor
through a fax machine.
2 (c) Voice Mail Survey

 Voice mail survey is a completely automated telephone survey method where fixed-
response questions are posed to a respondent through a pre-recorded voice of the
professional interviewer and the respondent is supposed to press the telephone
buttons to register the responses.
 The biggest advantage of this method is its ease for the respondent to be able to
provide the answer about the questions related to household consumable items.
 Non-human interaction is the major disadvantage of this method of survey.
Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI)
Technique

 Advances in computer technology allow the telephone interviewers to enter the

responses directly into a computer in a process known as “computer-assisted telephone
interviewing” (Moghaddam & Moballeghi, 2008).
 While conducting the CATI, an interviewer sits at the computer terminal that shows the
questionnaire. The interviewer reads each question displayed on the screen, gets the
respondent’s answer, and then inputs the responses.
 The major disadvantage of the CATI technique is its inability to contact Important
mobile respondents. Due to their job-related mobility, these respondents find
themselves uncomfortable to cope with the CATI.
Table 7.3: Advantages and disadvantages of the different
telephone interview techniques
3. Mail Interview
 In a mail survey, the questionnaire is sent to the respondent through mail and the respondent
returns the filled questionnaire (providing his opinion about the questions).
 In the mailing survey technique, the rate of return is a matter of concern.
 Some researchers favour providing some incentives to the respondents. Others believe that the
incentive type has no impact on the return of the survey (Church, 1993).
 Mail surveys generally provide accurate results because the respondent has enough time to think
and respond.
 Bias due to interviewer can also be controlled.
 Able to cover an extensive geographic area as compared with the personal interview technique.
 Return time is not guaranteed.
 It eliminates the possibility of explanation of difficult-to-understand question by the interviewer.
3(a) One-Time Mail Survey
3(b) Mail Panel

 In some cases, when the interviewer wants only onetime response from the respondent
and continuous information gathering is not desired, one-time mail survey is used.
 Reduced cost as compared with the personal interview is one major advantage of this
type of survey. Non-response is a major disadvantage.
 Mail panel is a group of respondents who have agreed to participate in the survey
conducted by the research agencies related to some business issues. The researchers
create the mail panel to generate continuous responses on certain research issues
related to the business research.
Table 7.4: Advantages and disadvantages of different mail interview techniques
4. Electronic Interview

 There seems to be a consensus that the electronic surveys in general are less expensive
than the traditional mail surveys because they do not involve printing, folding,
envelope stuffing, and mailing cost (Cole, 2005).
 In addition, non-involvement of the interviewer eliminates the possibility of bias due
to the interviewer. The obtained input data are also of superior quality in this
technique. Electronic surveys are also excellent facilitators in launching international
and cross-cultural research programmes.
 Electronic interview techniques are basically of two types: e-mail interview and web-
based interview.
4 (a) E-Mail Interview Technique
4 (b) Web-Based Interview Technique

 In an e-mail interview technique, the researcher sends the questionnaire to the

respondents by an e-mail. The respondents key in their answers and send the e-mail
back to the researcher.
 Time and cost efficiency, wide coverage, and quick response are the major advantages
of this technique. The major disadvantage is the lack of computer facility penetration in
households.
 Web-based interview techniques involve posting of the survey material on a particular
website.
 Inclusion of graphical display and sound in the web-based survey is an advantage over
the e-mail interview technique.
 Inspite of the increasing popularity of computers in day-to-day use, computer-literate
respondents are less in numbers.
Table 7.5: Advantages and disadvantages of different electronic interview techniques
Evaluation Criteria for Survey Methods
Table 7.6: Comparative evaluation of various survey methods on
different evaluation parameters