The purpose of using interviews for a research project is to collect in-depth information about a phenomenon under study from a small number of samples. The sample provides great information on behavior, attitudes, opinion, preferences, attributes, knowledge, and feelings. Interviews are effective in undertaking qualitative research. Interview questions are always open-ended questions because they allow the collection of in-depth information. Interviews can be carried out face-to-face, phone, or online. A researcher using the interview design may encounter methodological challenges in the reach project's design, generating interview questions and hypotheses, data collection, conducting interviews and challenges on transcription, coding, and presenting the data.
Social Sciences Agendas
In designing the research project, the researcher may find that research interviews are mostly flooded with a wide range of different social science agendas. These social science agendas aim to capture a set of orientations and concerns that are of importance to the researcher. The researcher works with a set of variables and factors and has a picture of how various elements socially affect each other. These social agenda pictures are always taken for granted until they become invisible. The agendas are expressed in different ways, such as during briefings of research recruitment, types of questions to be asked, how recipients are positioned, and categories to be used, and the organization of questions into narratives that build on the particular concerns of the researchers. The invisibility of these agendas influences participants' actions as they get to be recruited into a particular tradition of social science. It is difficult to notice these social science agendas because they are developed less explicitly.
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Footing or Positioning
The footing is another challenge that impacts how to operationalize research questions to interview questions and hypotheses. Footing comes about during a conversation between two or more people. When a person is speaking, he or she is doing so from different footing or positions. That means that every interaction occurs within a "participation framework." In this framework, the speaker is the one living ideas or may represent another speaker's ideas, and the speaker is the one being addressed.
Consequently, the focus is on a different base in which the participants communicate when it comes to interviews. They are speaking from the point of view of their own belief and unique preferences. Therefore, when a researcher is designing questions, they might do so in a way that restricts the respondent to either a membership that he is in or not within it. Tobi & Kampen (2018) mention that in designing research questions and generating a hypothesis, the researcher should pay careful attention to avoid making misleading inferences.
Interests and Stakes
The researcher may also face the challenge of getting accurate information during data collection. In every kind of interaction, individuals orient to issues of potential interests and stake. Respondents may respond to what other people are saying due to interests and use the issue as part of their talk. This is the common challenge of open-ended interviews. The researcher may also have his or her preferences and interests. With incorrect data, the researcher may fail to consider the risks of interview conclusions based on the researcher's prior expectations and not on the actual data from the interview.
Cognitive Individualism
During interviews, the researcher may face the challenge of reproduction of some cognitive individualism. This is a pervasive challenge, yet it always goes unnoticed in most interview research. The point is that the perspective is not necessarily wrong, but there is no way of testing it if it comes up from cognitive individualism. Most interview research comes from the presupposed vision of human life rather than what is discovered. The ironic part about this situation is that many researchers who use qualitative interviews expose a non-individualistic and critical perspective towards social life. For example, participants are recruited to report on the social process, events, and various cognitive objects such as beliefs and attitudes. The way of explicitly conceptual mediation often provides a way in which participants' social organizations and minds are structured. The participants will orient these aspects into their answers by giving their reflective thoughts theoretically. Therefore, according to Prior (2018), interviews depend on a wide range of ambitious feats of memory, ambitious cognitive analysis, and judgments.
Analytic Observations Connected to Interview Features
Lastly, in coding and transcription, the researcher may face challenges of tying analytic observations to specific aspects of interviews. There is the tendency of the researcher to under analyze critical data. Under analysis, this problem can come up during summarizing, or by taking sides or over quotations and overgeneralizing claims. The consequences include a lack of clarity on the specific elements of the interviewees' report. It is a challenge that collapses transcription through the grouping of different conservational elements. The interviewee's answers can be technically built from several elements that cannot be easily separated due to the representative form.
References
Prior, M. T. (2018). Accomplishing "rapport" in qualitative research interviews: Empathic moments in interaction. Applied Linguistics Review , 9 (4), 487-511.
Tobi, H., & Kampen, J. K. (2018). Research design: the methodology for an interdisciplinary research framework. Quality & quantity , 52 (3), 1209-1225.
