Respondent Interviews

Respondent interviews are data collected for research purposes. When conducting respondent interviews, a researcher or research team will ask questions of individuals about the individuals’ opinions or experiences regarding a particular activity or event. The responses they receive from the individuals are the data that the researchers will use to conduct their analysis for communication research. Respondent interviews can be structured or unstructured, and can produce many different types of data. This entry will describe respondent interviews, compare and contrast the different types of respondent interviews, and discuss some of the ways in which interviewers can best accomplish the process of respondent interviewing.

Initially, respondent interviews can be structured or unstructured. A structured interview is similar to a questionnaire for data collection. When collecting data in a structured interview, researchers will use a specific set of questions, sometimes even having the respondents select an answer from a series of choices. For instance, researchers working for a candidate in an election might call a sampling of individuals to ask about their preferences for candidates or policies in order to work out the best campaign messaging. The researcher might frame the question very specifically such as “Please indicate how satisfied you are with the current rate for property taxes: very satisfied, satisfied, neutral, dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied.”

Respondent interviews may also be unstructured. An unstructured interview is similar to a structured interview in that researchers will ask questions of respondents. However, the unstructured interview typically has broader or more open questions. Rather than asking a structured question like the example from a political campaign, a researcher doing an unstructured interview might ask a broader, open-ended question such as “How do you feel about the current rate of property tax?” Unstructured interviews also allow for a researcher to ask follow-up questions of the respondent to get a more detailed or clearer answer to the question. For instance, if in response to the aforementioned question a respondent said, “I feel angry about the property tax rate,” an interviewer could follow up by asking “Tell me [Page 1471]more about what makes you angry with the property tax rate.”

Unstructured respondent interviews can be just slightly unstructured or very unstructured depending on the nature of the analysis a researcher will use. Researchers who are interested in using interviews to expand on the data that they would gather using a questionnaire, may want to keep the questionnaire somewhat structured while allowing for follow-up questioning. However, other researchers may be hoping to use the data differently. For instance, researchers could use interviews as a way to learn more about phenomena that cannot be directly observed. A researcher interested in the ways that families of adopted children integrate their children into the family will not likely be able to make direct observations of family life during those moments because it would be intrusive. However, a researcher could interview members of the family and friends of the family to learn more about their thoughts and feelings surrounding integration of the children after adoption. These interviews will have a basic structure, but would allow for a substantial amount of creativity in follow-up questions in order to explore the nature of the respondents’ ideas. In other cases, researchers might be interested in the ways in which respondents use language—these researchers would also use unstructured interviews in an attempt to record as much talk-in-action from the respondents that they can so that the language use and patterns may be explored.

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