Disadvantages of Unstructured Interviews
Social desirability bias is a major problem you'll encounter with unstructured interviews. Respondents often tell interviewers what they think they want to hear rather than their honest opinions. This happens especially when there are differences in social characteristics like class, age, or ethnicity between interviewer and interviewee.
Interviewer bias can seriously affect results through leading questions that steer responses in particular directions. For example, asking "Wouldn't you agree that politicians are paid too much?" pushes the interviewee towards a specific answer rather than getting their genuine view.
The lack of reliability makes these interviews problematic for scientific research. Since there are no preset questions, other researchers can't easily repeat the study to check results. Positivists argue this leads to a loss of objectivity as interviewers may become too personally involved.
Key Point: Remember that people don't always act the way they say they do - this creates validity issues that examiners often ask about.
Practical problems include the high cost of training skilled interviewers and the time-consuming nature of both conducting and analysing lengthy interviews. You also can't generalise findings from small-scale studies to wider populations.
