Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of unstructured interviews in sociological research.


Interpretivists argue that sociological research should take the form of unstructured interviews. This is due to the fact that to get a well rounded and subjective understanding, interview questions should be more open ended and qualitative. However while this may produce results that are high in validity, many other sociologists view this school of thought as flawed. This is because the results produced can be seen as biased, due to the subjectivity of the data. Furthermore,  this methodology style is argued as being very time consuming to conduct and to analyse the qualitative data.

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