When you've gone through the entire interview, you need to bring the interview to closure. Some important things to remember:
• Thank the respondent
Don't forget to do this. Even if the respondent was troublesome or uninformative, it is important for you to be polite and thank them for their time.
• Tell them when you expect to send results
I hate it when people conduct interviews and then don't send results and summaries to the people who they get the information from. You owe it to your respondent to show them what you learned. Now, they may not want your entire 300-page dissertation. It's common practice to prepare a short, readable, jargon-free summary of interviews that you can send to the respondents.
• Don't be brusque or hasty
Allow for a few minutes of winding down conversation. The respondent may want to know a little bit about you or how much you like doing this kind of work. They may be interested in how the results will be used. Use these kinds of interests as a way to wrap up the conversation. As you're putting away your materials and packing up to go, engage the respondent. You don't want the respondent to feel as though you completed the interview and then rushed out on them -- they may wonder what they said that was wrong. On the other hand, you have to be careful here.
Some respondents may want to keep on talking long after the interview is over. You have to find a way to politely cut off the conversation and make your exit.
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• Immediately after leaving -- write down any notes about how the interview went Sometimes you will have observations about the interview that you didn't want to write down while you were with the respondent. You may have noticed them get upset at a question, or you may have detected hostility in a response. Immediately after the interview you should go over your notes and make any other comments and observations -- but be sure to distinguish these from the notes made during the interview (you might use a different color pen, for instance).
• Plus & Minus of Survey Methods
It's hard to compare the advantages and disadvantages of the major different survey types. Even though each type has some general advantages and disadvantages, there are exceptions to almost every rule. Here's my general assessment. Perhaps you would differ in your ratings here or there, but I think you'll generally agree.
Issue Questionnaire Interview
Group Mail
Drop-Off Personal Phone Are Visual Presentations Possible? Yes Yes Yes Yes No Are Long Response Categories
Possible? Yes Yes Yes ??? No
Is Privacy A Feature? No Yes No Yes ???
Is the Method Flexible? No No No Yes Yes
Are Open-ended Questions Feasible? No No No Yes Yes Is Reading & Writing Needed? ??? Yes Yes No No Can You Judge Quality of Response? Yes No ??? Yes ???
Are High Response Rates Likely? Yes No Yes Yes No
Can You Explain Study in Person? Yes No Yes Yes ???
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Is It Low Cost? Yes Yes No No No
Are Staff & Facilities Needs Low? Yes Yes No No No Does It Give Access to Dispersed
Samples? No Yes No No No
Does Respondent Have Time to
Formulate Answers? No Yes Yes No No
Is There Personal Contact? Yes No Yes Yes No
Is A Long Survey Feasible? No No No Yes No
Is There Quick Turnaround? No Yes No No Yes
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Scaling
Scaling is the branch of measurement that involves the construction of an instrument that associates qualitative constructs with quantitative metric units. Scaling evolved out of efforts in psychology and education to measure "unmeasurable" constructs like authoritarianism and self esteem. In many ways, scaling remains one of the most arcane and misunderstood aspects of social research measurement. And, it attempts to do one of the most difficult of research tasks -- measure abstract concepts.
Most people don't even understand what scaling is. The basic idea of scaling is described in General Issues in Scaling, including the important distinction between a scale and a response format. Scales are generally divided into two broad categories: unidimensional and
multidimensional. The unidimensional scaling methods were developed in the first half of the twentieth century and are generally named after their inventor. We'll look at three types of unidimensional scaling methods here:
• Thurstone or Equal-Appearing Interval Scaling
• Likert or "Summative" Scaling
• Guttman or "Cumulative" Scaling
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, measurement theorists developed more advanced techniques for creating multidimensional scales. Although these techniques are not considered here, you may want to look at the method of concept mapping that relies on that approach to see the power of these multivariate methods.
• General Issues in Scaling
S.S. Stevens came up with what I think is the simplest and most straightforward definition of scaling. He said:
Scaling is the assignment of objects to numbers according to a rule.
But what does that mean? In most scaling, the objects are text statements, usually statements of attitude or belief. The figure shows an example. There are three
statements describing attitudes towards immigration. To scale these statements, we have to assign
Edited by Shomoita Alam Lopa 150 numbers to them. Usually, we would like the result to be on at least an interval scale (see Levels of Measurement) as indicated by the ruler in the figure. And what does "according to a rule"
mean? If you look at the statements, you can see that as you read down, the attitude towards immigration becomes more restrictive -- if a person agrees with a statement on the list, it's likely that they will also agree with all of the statements higher on the list. In this case, the "rule" is a cumulative one. So what is scaling? It's how we get numbers that can be meaningfully assigned to objects -- it's a set of procedures. We'll present several different approaches below.
But first, I have to clear up one of my pet peeves. People often confuse the idea of a scale and a response scale. A response scale is the way you collect responses from people on an instrument.
You might use a dichotomous response scale like Agree/Disagree, True/False, or Yes/No. Or, you might use an interval response scale like a 1-to-5 or 1-to-7 rating. But, if all you are doing is attaching a response scale to an object or statement, you can't call that scaling. As you will see, scaling involves procedures that you do independent of the respondent so that you can come up with a numerical value for the object. In true scaling research, you use a scaling procedure to develop your instrument (scale) and you also use a response scale to collect the responses from participants. But just assigning a 1-to-5 response scale for an item is not scaling! The differences are illustrated in the table below.
Scale Response Scale
results from a process is used to collect the response for an item
each item on scale has a scale value
item not associated with a scale value
refers to a set of items used for a single item