Assess the advantages and disadvantages of unstructured interviews of gender and subject choice.

Assess the advantages and disadvantages of unstructured interviews of gender and subject choice.
There are strong advantages for the use of unstructured interviews of subject choice and gender, as using an interview collects qualitative date through using open ended questions and this then allows the researcher to gain detailed analysis, however this does make it hard to be representative of a whole population.
Interpretists usually advocate the use of qualitative data to interpret social action therefore this type of research method allows for verstehen. Using unstructured interviews it allows more of an opportunity for the respondents to give their own answer especially for complex topics such as in school subject choice.
The use of unstructured interview is long, this can be because of many different things, for example, the topic of subject choice could have many causes and the conversation could therefore go off track or waste time talking about gender being the cause of their choice. This also goes along with the fact that by using open ended questions it could allow for the interview to go on for hours. Interviewers may also be required to undergo a Criminal Records Bureau Check; this could add expense and elongate the study further. Nowadays you need a new CRB check for each county that you travel to which would lengthen the study even more than just the planning and the simple unstructured interviews.
Building rapport between the interviewee and the interviewer can be difficult as they are dealing with two different genders therefore needing a different interviewer for each which can become complex and can also lead to the participants acting in a way that they think will be helpful to the results but does however make the whole study inaccurate and decreases the reliability, Hawthorne effect.
Interviews need to be carefully designed to take into account the children’s less developed language kills and shorter attention span. Questions therefore need to be phrased in simple language and the interview should be kept short, however this is hard to achieve within an unstructured interview especially when questioning such a bread and complex situation such as gender and subject as there can be many causes for their unique subject choice.