Individual Interviews
Advantages
Interviews create complex, detailed responses from participants and allow in-depth questions to be asked.
Interviews are extremely useful in generating quotes and stories for many people to understand and relate to. Additionally, interviews allow a space for complex questions to be asked as well as encouraging multi-dimensional responses from participants.
Interviews are also rewarding for participants to stimulate self-exploration and discovery about their own opinions and experiences.
Disadvantages
Interviews can seem intrusive to participants and also require a large time commitment for detailed questions.
Interviews can appear to be intrusive to participants as the questions can be very personal and invoke a lot of emotions. Interviewers must handle the emotions brought up by interviews with sensitivity.
Additionally, interview can be susceptible to bias, where participants might answer in ways they believe the researcher wants to hear or the researcher’s views can influence the participants’ responses. This can be done through leading questions and verbal and non-verbal cues.
When to use
Individual interviews are useful with a small group of people and the goal is to obtain detailed, personal, and complex information.
Focus Groups
Advantages
Focus groups promote open communication, deeper thinking, and can reduce the power imbalance between participant and researcher.
Group settings can help people think about their own beliefs and values, encourage participation from people who may be less likely to speak, and can clarify similarities and differences between people’s opinions and experiences (Freeman 493).
The group structure of focus groups can alleviate the power imbalances that may otherwise make open, honest communication feel unsafe or unwelcome for participants (Alder et. al. 2).
Because they are conversation-based, “focus groups excel in revealing what participants think and why they think as they do” (Cyr 3).
Disadvantages
The information gained from focus groups cannot tell the entire story of a community — each person has their own valuable perspective, but they do not speak for everyone.
Participants may say what they think their peers or the moderator wants to hear, instead of what they truly believe — this is called social desirability bias (Alder et. al. 11).
“Focus groups may discourage certain people from participating, including those who are not very articulate or confident or those with communication problems or special needs. Focus groups may also discourage some individuals from sharing sensitive or personal information because anonymity cannot be ensured” (Alder et. al. 11).
Focus groups center on individuals’ experiences and beliefs, which may obscure the importance of the social context, “including the potential relationships between participants and the larger social structures in which the opinions and perspectives of individuals are sought” (Cyr 4).
When to use
Focus groups are useful for learning a lot of specific information about what members of a community think and how their experiences compare.
Surveys
Advantages
When using surveys, research questions will work towards proving or mitigating their hypothesis with their own generated questions.
There are many different survey options available, including, face-to-face surveys, telephone surveys, self-administered surveys, internet surveys, etc.
Reliability — focuses on the research instrument, and questionnaires if the research results are consistent.
Validity — focuses on the results of the survey, specifically what was intended to be studied.
Researchers will craft their survey in a way to control the order of the survey questions and wording, so respondents follow a particular question following the researchers theme.
Disadvantages
Surveys present some limitations including non-responses, wording misunderstandings, and formatting confusion.
There are social pressure and desirability that may hinder the answers of participants (Engle 2011, 398).
It is also important to consider accessibility in survey research. Surveys tend to include participants who have high incomes, telephones, and speak a particular language (Engle 2011).
It is difficult to create questions for all research respondents to understand.
Some people are more difficult to sample in the sense that they are hard to contact, complex to identify, or not interested in engaging in research. (Khoury 2020, 510).
When to use
Surveys are useful when conducting research of a large group to understand a topic more generally. Interviews and focus groups are beneficial to obtain more details.