Describe Personal interviews

Personal interviews
People selected to be part of the sample are interviewed in person by a trained interviewer.
Requirements for success
Three broad conditions must be met in order to have a successful personal interview:
• The participant must possess the information being targeted by the investigative questions
• The participant must understand his or her role in the interview as the provider of accurate information
• The participant must perceive adequate motivation to cooperate

Increasing the participant’s receptiveness
The first goal in an interview is to establish a friendly relationship with the participant. Three factors will help increase participant receptiveness. The participant must:
• Believe that the experience will be pleasant and satisfying
• Believe that answering the survey is an important and worthwhile use of his or her time
• Dismiss any mental reservations that he or she might have about participation.

The technique of stimulating participants to answer more fully and relevantly is termed probing. Since it presents a great potential for bias, a probe should be neutral and appear as a natural part of the conversation. Appropriate probes should be specified by the designer of the data collection instrument. There are several probing styles e.g.
• A brief assertion of understanding and interest e.g. comments such as “I see” “yes”.
• An expectant pause
• Repeating the question
• Repeating the participant’s reply
• A neutral question or comment
• Question clarification.

Problems likely to be encountered during personal interviews
In personal interviews, the researcher must deal with bias and cost.
Biased results is as a result of three types of errors:
(a) Sampling error
It’s the difference between a sample statistic and its corresponding population parameter. The sampling distribution of the sample means is a probability distribution of possible sample means of a given sample size.

(b) Non-response error
This occurs when the responses of participants differ in some systematic way from the responses of non-participants. It occurs when the researcher:
? Cannot locate the person to be studied
? Is unsuccessful in encouraging that person to participate
Solutions to reduce errors of non-response are
• Establishing and implementing callback procedures
• Creating a non response sample and weighting results from this sample
• Substituting another individual for the missing non-participant.
(c) Response error
Occurs when the data reported differ from the actual data. It can occur during the interview or during preparation of data analysis.
- Participant-initiated error occurs when the participant fails to answer fully and accurately either by choice or because of inaccurate or incomplete knowledge. Can be solved by using trained interviewers who are knowledgeable about such problems.
- Interviewer error can be caused by:-
- Failure to secure full participant cooperation
- Failure to consistently execute interview procedures
- Failure to establish appropriate interview environment
- Falsification of individual answers or whole interviews
- Inappropriate influencing behaviour
- Failure to record answers accurately and completely
- Physical presence bias.

Advantages of Personal interviews
• Good cooperation from the respondents
• Interviewer can answer questions about survey, probe for answers, use follow-up questions and gather information by observation.
• Special visual aids and scoring devices can be used.
• Illiterate and functionally illiterate respondents can be reached
• Interviewer can prescreen respondent to ensure he / she fits the population profile.
• Responses can be entered directly into a portable microcomputer to reduce error and cost when using computer assisted personal interviewing.

Disadvantages of Personal interviews
• High costs
• Need for highly trained interviewers
• Longer period needed in the field collecting data
• May be wide geographic dispersion
• Follow-up is labour intensive
• Not all respondents are available or accessible
• Some respondents are unwilling to talk to strangers in their homes
• Some neighbourhoods are difficult to visit
• Questions may be altered or respondent coached by interviewers.

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Titany answered the question on October 21, 2021 at 13:25