Examine the Reasons Why Some Sociologists Choose to Use Structured Interviews When Conducting Research

Examine the reasons why some sociologists choose to use structured interviews when conducting research.
There are three types of interviews; structured, unstructured and semi-structured interviews. The most commonly used types of interviews by sociologists are structured interviews and unstructured interviews. Structured interviews have various advantages, therefore, some sociologists, mainly Positivist sociologists, choose to use structured interviews when conducting research.
Positivists are mainly interested in research methods that achieve their main goals of reliability, generalisability and representativeness, for this reason, they favour structured interviews as they achieve these goals. This is because structured interviews often have questions and answers that are standardised; they are reliable because they can be therefore replicated. Positivist sociologists also prefer to use structured interviews when conducting research because the pre-coded responses mean that quantitative data can be produced and so cause-and-effect relationships can be established. Also, structured interviews are representative and can therefore be generalised, because of the fact that they are often large-scale.
There are also practical advantages to using structured interviews. For an example, training interviewers is relatively easy and inexpensive as no specialist skills have to be taught as the questions tend to be very straightforward as they often close-ended, and do not require too much thought. Also, because skills taught are minimal, the process of training interviewers will not cost too much. Another practical advantage, is that structured interviews are relatively cheap and easy to administer, so large quantities of interviews can be carried out, meaning that are large-scale , so sociologists, especially Positivists’, can generalise data as the data found will be representative.
Also, another practical advantage is that they are relatively straightforward to carry out, and factual information can be found out quickly and cheaply, such as a person’s age. A final practical advantage, adding to why sociologists may choose structured interviews, is that because the questions are close-ended, the results can be easily quantified and so structured interviews are very suitable for hypothesis testing.
An ethical advantage is that informed consent can be found, if the interview is carried out on the children, informed consent can be provided by the parents. Another ethical advantage, adding to why sociologists choose structured interviews, is that interviewees may feel more relaxed about answering questions, because they should be told that they have the right not to answer any question they do not want to.
Another advantage, is that although the numbers that can be studied using structured interviews are relatively lower than that of postal questionnaires, structured interviews generally have a higher response rate. For an example, in the case of Young and Willmott’s study, only 54 out of 987 people that they asked to interview, refused to be interviewed, possibly because it is easier to simply not complete and post back a questionnaire than to turn down an interview, because with interviews, the request for one is often face-to-face, and many people will prefer interviews because of the chance to talk to someone about particular issues that they feel strongly about and have opinions about. Response rates may also be fairly high with structured interviews, making the interviews more representative, because the interviewer may make several call backs to people who initially fail to respond to questions, and therefore, a better basis for generalisation, which is required for Positivists’ research, can be provided.