Research Methods in Tourism, Hospitality and Events Management

6.5 Interviewing

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This section is divided into four parts investigating the nature and practice

of undertaking interviews. The first part discusses the different types of

interview, followed by interview errors, telephone and group interviews.

6.5.1 Types of interview

When interviewing individual respondents, there are perhaps two broad

types of interview method – structured and unstructured. The differences

between them are revealed in 

Table 6.2

.

Between these two extremes are a variety of other techniques which are

more or less structured. For example, some interviews avoid a standardised

questionnaire but answers are ‘focused’ around a series of open questions

which gently guide the respondent. On the other side, where there is

unsystematic questioning of respondents, only a topic area may be specified

by the interviewer and the respondent is free to pursue their own particular

line of thought.

Whilst it may appear easy to be dismissive of unstructured interviews as a

waste of time, the purpose of the two broad methods should be considered.

Unstructured interviews may be used to ‘discover’ the attitudes and

opinions of, say, a tourist or customer rather than to ‘prove’ or ‘test’

something. If the research objective is to test whether age or social class has

an influence on tourist purchasing behaviour, then something more

structured will be necessary. However, in doing so it may be first

appropriate to discover the range of views with unstructured interviews so

that a structured questionnaire and interviews can be designed and

conducted. Hence, unstructured (or less structured) interviews may be

useful in the preliminary stages in preparing for and informing more

structured data collection. In 

Illustration 6.2

, an example is given of the

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prompts that were used by a student using a semi-structured interview

technique.

Illustration 6.2 Interview prompts used in a semi-structured

interview

Your role here at…

Tell me about the business.

Aware of the term culinary tourism?

Your understanding?

Untapped potential?

What could be done to strengthen…?

What challenges do you think Devon and Cornwall face…?

What support do you receive?

Do you receive enough?

Opportunity to combat seasonality?

Strategies to extend season?

Marketing attempts.

Successful?

Important for business for culinary tourism to grow?

Anything else to share?

Source: ‘Culinary tourism in Devon and Cornwall: a supply-side

perspective’ by Rebecca Makepiece, final-year project,

supervised by Craig Wight, Plymouth University, 2014.