“Write short note : Interview as a method of social research.” (1985)
- An interview is a purposive, direct verbal interaction between a researcher and a respondent, conducted specifically to collect data relevant to a research objective — distinct from an ordinary conversation in being prepared, controlled, and oriented toward a specific end.
- Robert Merton, Marjorie Fiske, and Patricia Kendall’s development of the focused interview stands as the technique’s landmark methodological contribution, showing how structure and openness can be combined rather than traded off.
- The technique’s main design choice runs along a single axis — how much of the interview is fixed in advance versus left to unfold — and each position on that axis buys a different combination of reliability, validity, and depth.
- This note treats the interview as its own dedicated method, since elsewhere it appears only as one item within a broader technique family.
Structured, Unstructured, and Semi-Structured Interviews
- The structured interview uses fixed questions, fixed order, and fixed wording, often with pre-set response categories — this maximises reliability and comparability across respondents, since every respondent faces an identical stimulus, but leaves no room for probing or for anything the researcher did not anticipate.
- The unstructured interview is a guided conversation shaped by the respondent’s own flow of thought, with no predetermined wording or sequence — this maximises validity and depth, since the respondent can raise what actually matters to them, but at the cost of low comparability and low reliability across different respondents.
- The semi-structured interview works from a topic guide while retaining freedom to probe unexpected answers — this middle position is what most real sociological research actually uses, balancing the structured interview’s comparability against the unstructured interview’s depth.
The Focused Interview and Its Legacy
- Merton, Fiske, and Kendall’s focused interview is designed for interviewing people known to share exposure to a particular concrete situation — a broadcast, an event, a policy change — with the interview concentrating specifically on their subjective response to that shared stimulus.
- Its innovation was combining a controlled, pre-analysed situation (which keeps the data comparable across respondents) with genuinely open elicitation of subjective response (which keeps the data rich).
- This technique is the direct ancestor of today’s focus group discussion — the same underlying logic extended from an individual respondent to a small group interacting around a shared stimulus.
Characteristic Failure Modes
- Interviewer bias: the interviewer’s tone, choice of words, body language, or visible expectations can shape the answer a respondent gives, independent of what the respondent actually believes.
- Social-desirability bias: respondents tend to report the answer that reflects well on them rather than their honest position, a distortion that grows sharper as a topic becomes more sensitive.
- The interviewer effect: a respondent’s answers can shift measurably depending on the interviewer’s own caste, gender, age, or class — the same question can elicit different answers depending on who is asking it.
- Large Indian household survey programmes have documented measurable interviewer effects of exactly this kind on sensitive indicators — reported prevalence of issues such as intimate partner violence has been shown to vary systematically with the characteristics of the fieldworker conducting the interview, underscoring that the interviewer effect is not a merely theoretical concern in Indian survey research.
- Ann Oakley’s feminist critique of the orthodox demand for interviewer detachment argues, in brief, that forced neutrality can itself distort the data by suppressing the rapport needed for honest disclosure — a challenge that bears directly on how interviewer bias is best managed.
Strengths and Weaknesses
- Its strengths: flexibility to adapt questions to the respondent and probe unclear answers, depth unmatched by a fixed-response instrument, generally higher response rates than a mailed questionnaire, and — unlike the questionnaire, which presumes a literate respondent who can read and write answers — the interview can be used with illiterate respondents, since the interviewer does the reading and recording.
- Its weaknesses: it is costly and time-consuming relative to a self-administered questionnaire, it is vulnerable to interviewer-introduced bias at every stage from question delivery to answer recording, and the face-to-face format’s reduced anonymity can discourage honest disclosure on sensitive topics precisely where honest data matters most.
- The interview occupies a distinctive middle ground among data-collection techniques — more flexible than the questionnaire, more comparable across respondents than pure participant observation.
- Its value depends entirely on matching the right point on the structured–unstructured continuum to the research question, not on defaulting to whichever format is most convenient.
- Merton’s focused interview remains the clearest demonstration that structure and openness are not opposites but can be designed to work together, a lesson embedded institutionally today in the ubiquity of the focus group.
- Managing interviewer-introduced bias — through training, careful interviewer selection, or a more reflexive stance toward the interviewer’s own social position — remains a live methodological challenge that recent Indian survey evidence on sensitive-topic reporting continues to sharpen rather than resolve.