Semi structured interviews

Semi structured interviews as one of the instruments that were used to gather the data in this study were administered to teachers teaching in grade 3, 6, and 9 in the selected schools. Saez (2010) mentions that in semi structured interviews, the entire process is improvised and conversational, while key points and answers are recorded on a form designed to evaluate and sort answers and this gives the person being interviewed a chance to give a lot of good information, while making the entire process seem more like a normal conversation than a question session.

Semi-structured interviews are interviews also described by literature as ones that allow a free and open context. Such openness allows focused, conversational, two-view way communication, where the interviewer follows a guideline but is able to phrase the questions any way they see best, when it seems appropriate. They maintain a gap where not all questions are designed and phrased ahead of time, as a number of questions are created during the interview, allowing both the interviewer and the person being interviewed the flexibility to go into details when needed. (Nichols, 19991:131; Saez, 2010; Wimmer and Dominic, 1997:156; Breakwell, Hammond and Fife-Schwa, 1995:231).

Saez (2010) identifies that semi structured interviews carry a series of advantages which are of:

Being not as invasive as a structured interview, as instead of being forced to answer questions directly, the interviewee can expand and also question the interviewer. This allowed the researcher in the study to probe and expand more on the questions that were asked to get amore richer response.

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Being useful not just for confirming the same information, but also learning more and giving the answers reason and context; making it easier for candidates to talk about sensitive subjects and issues. Because it was a free and two way communications, a lot of information which would have been difficult and sensitive to share was explored.

Questions being prepared ahead of time allowing the interviewer to be prepared and appear competent during the interview. This allowed the research to be calm and collected, providing motivation and support to the respondents as they tend to fear interviews. Also what I noticed was that the preparation also minimised cases of having a boring and repetitive interview process.

Allowing informants the freedom to express their views in their own terms and can provide reliable, comparable qualitative data.

In the light of the above advantages of a semi structured interview, the following are the limitations to this kind of interviews:

Since the interview is conversational in nature, it could bring up a lot of unnecessary information. Focus and probing more on responses responded to this limitation. In a group interview, candidates could end up assisting each other or speak out of turn. This might cause them to lose focus on the topic. Each respondent was informed beforehand that, it is expected of every member of the session to share his or her views as they may differ to other people. This helped a lot in avoiding this limitation in the focus group interviews.

Requires training as many problems can arise, such as leading questions, poor listening skills, not asking probing questions, repeating questions, not judging the

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answers or asking questions that are insensitive or not specific. The question guide was prepared before hand and piloted on a few people before used to overcome such challenges.

Time consuming and resource intensive. The interview sessions for each selected school were done on the same day for respondents in each school during their break time. A voice recorder was used and further supplemented with field notes taken during the session

You have to be able to ensure confidentiality. Pseudo names were used (Saez, 2010).

Furthermore, justification on the use of this instrument regardless of the limitations is the authentic understanding the study aims to bring in this research, with, as literature claims, the main way to achieve such an understanding into people’s experiences being an interview (Silverman, 2006:119). Moreover, the world never speaks directly to us but is always encoded via recording instruments like field notes and transcripts and as such the use of interviews in this study is determined by need to hear the voices of the teachers themselves describing and constructing meaning of the phenomena being researched (Silverman, 2006:113).

Four respondents were interviewed for the interviews. All the respondents were teachers teaching in the General Education and Training Band. The language used was English as it is a language of communication in schools. However, respondents were allowed to respond in either English or in isiXhosa (their mother tongue). The interviews were responding to the following research questions:

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 What conception do teachers have of a well-resourced school and an under- resourced school?

 What challenges do the teachers experience in their teaching and learning

activities due to under resourcing and how do they resolve them?

 Which strategies do teachers use to deliver the content of the learning areas offered in their under resourced schools?

 What success do the teachers have in their under-resourced schools?