Interview Guide
In contrast to the rigidity of standardized interviews, unstandardized interviews are loosely structured and are located on the imaginary continuum (as depicted in Figure 4.1) at the opposite extreme from standardized interviews. While certain topics may be necessary and planned, the actual flow of the conversation will vary considerably according to the responses of each informant. No specific questions need to be scripted. As much as possible, the interviewer encour-
ages the informant to lead the conversation. In place of an “interview schedule,” researchers prepare a looser set of topics or issues that one plans on discussing, possibly with a preferred order in which to address them. These “interview
guidelines” serve as notes, or possibly a checklist, for the interviewer. One way or another, by whatever route you
and your informant follow, the guidelines indicate the subject matter that you intend to cover Naturally, unstandardized interviews operate from a different set of assumptions than those of standardized interviews. First, interviewers begin with the assumption that they do not know in advance what all the necessary questions are. Consequently, they cannot predetermine a complete list of questions to ask. They also assume that not all subjects will necessarily find equal meaning in like-worded questions—in short, that subjects may possess different vocabularies or different symbolic associations. Rather than papering over these individual differences, extent that standardized interviews are applied to relatively straightforward matters of fact, these assumptions seem safe.Standardized interviews are useful when the data to be gathered concerns tangible information such as recent events, priorities, or relatively simple matters of opinion.
They are also a preferred method when multiple interviewers or teams are to conduct comparable interviews in different settings. Keeping each interview on the same track makes it possible to aggregate the data despite differences among the interviewers or the subjects.In sum, standardized interviews are designed to elicit information using a set of predetermined questions that are expected to elicit the subjects’ thoughts, opinions, and attitudes about study-related issues. A standardized interview may be thought of as a kind of survey interview. Standardized interviews, thus, operate from the perspective that one’s thoughts are intricately related to one’s actions in the sense that one measures tangible facts, such as actions, without further probing questions about informants’ thoughts or interpretations. Standardized interviews are frequently used on very large research projects in which multiple interviewers collect the same data from informants from the same sample pool. This format is also useful for longitudinal studies in which the researcher wishes to measure, as closely as possible, exactly the same data at multiple points in time.
A typical standardized interview schedule might look like this job history:
1. At what age did you get your first full-time job?
2. What was the job?
3. How long did you work there?
4. Did you have another job offer at the time that you left this job?
5. What was your next full-time job?
6. How long did you hold that job?
7. How many times, if ever, have you quit a job?
8. How many times, if ever, have you been laid off?
9. How many times, if ever, have you been fired from a job?
