INTERVIEW-A Qualitative Research Method

Law reflects social values, attitudes and behaviours. Societal values and norms, therefore influence law directly or indirectly. Typically, before the law is framed, the legislators and their agencies meet all the stakeholders in the society, i.e. those who stand to directly benefit by the law, and frame the laws based on the inputs received from these social groups.In legal research, there is an increasing amount of interest in understanding the roles of various stakeholders like judges, lawyers and citizens play in shaping the legal and judicial system in a country.

To advance the science of law, it is necessary for the researcher to go deep into the underlying principles or the need/effectiveness of the law.  Researcher will have to find answers for questions such as: why a particular rule? What were the societal conditions under which the rules were framed? What requirements are there to change? What are the effects of current law? Whether is it suited to current conditions? What are the changes that need to be incorporated and why? How will it affect the future conditions that may occur?

One may hence conclude that in order to conduct legal research, the researcher needs to take inputs of all the stakeholders of the law in question in the society. Because of the subjectivity of law, and its sensitivity to existing social and legal contexts, qualitative methods of research seem more appropriate primary method of data collection in order to capture the essence of the law and to provide a holistic view of the same.

Interview is a verbal technique of data collection used specially in the field research connected with the study of human behaviour. Interviews resemble everyday conversations, although they are focused on the researcher’s needs for data. There is no preparation involved in everyday conversations. However, interviews require a certain amount of planning and design. It is a direct method of inquiry.

The main purpose of interview is to gather data extensively and intensively.  The interviewer has the objectives of the research in mind and how to direct the conversation towards eliciting information on the research topic. Interviewer has a set of issues to cover during the interview. The interviewer’s role is to keep the topic in focus, check on unclear points and enable the interviewee to recollect thoughts. In short, the interviewer encourages the participant to share his ideas and experiences and consequently gathers data.

Qualitative interviews are often used in an exploratory manner which seeks to probe the subjective interpretations of social phenomena. One of the key differences between this and other methods is that, they do not necessarily presume that most of the topics of interest are known in advance. Successful interviews start with thorough planning. Whatever may be the type of interview, planning is essential. Interviewer has to think through the whole process starting from what he is hoping achieve through the interview, who will be respondents, what kind of questions to ask them or by which questions the required data can be elicited and so on. Interviewer also has to plan for the visual articles he might want to show the participants while asking questions, recorder and/or a microphone among other things. Researcher needs to be very clear about the research objective of conducting an interview. Researcher needs to clearly think and write down what he hopes to achieve through each interview. In other words, how the content of the interview will help in answering the research question.

The strength of qualitative research is its ability to provide detailed descriptions of a given research issue such as victim’s experience or motive. Qualitative methods are very effective in identifying intangible factors, such as social norms, cause of a particular behavior, view of the Society etc.