After having answered the question “what is a market research interview” it is worth covering the different types of interviews. They may be highly formalized and structured, using standardized questions for each respondent, or they may be informal and unstructured conversations. Sanders et al (2011) distinguish three categories:

1. Structured interviews
2. Semi-structured interviews
3. Unstructured or in-depth interviews

Another typology (Healey 1991) differentiates between: standardized interviews and non-standardized interviews. The standard ones are usually applied for questionnaires while non-standardized for more qualitative researches. At the same time, non-standardized interviews may be divided into “one to one” and “one to many” One to one may be divided into “face to face”, “telephone interviews” and “Internet and intranet-mediated (electronic) interviews. Market research interviews are generally referred to one-to-one interviews (one to many refereed to focus group). The most common are face-to-face although internet mediated´s importance is growing and growing.

Finally, interviews may be classified as to the sort of people interviewed (so called interviewee). The interest of market research interviews is normally the everyday activities. Whereby, people is recruited depending of social variables like age, gender of profession. However, as Meuser and Nagel (2002) suggests, it exists the so called expert interviews. Here the interviews are of less interest as a (whole) person than their capacities of being an expert for a certain field of activity. In any case, the attention in this blog and in following post will be put on non-experts interviewee.

Reference

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