Excelitas Technologies Sales Engineer interview questions

The unstructured informal interview is normally conducted as a preliminary step in the research process to generate ideas/hypotheses about the subject being investigated so that these might be tested later in the survey proper. Such interviews are entirely informal and are not controlled by a specific set of detailed questions. Rather the interviewer is guided by a pre-defined list of issues. These interviews amount to an informal conversation about the subject. Informal interviewing is not concerned with discovering 'how many' respondents think in a particular way on an issue (this is what the final survey itself will discover). The aim is to find out how people think and how they react to issues, so that the ultimate survey questionnaire can be framed along the lines of thought that will be most natural to respondents. The respondent is encouraged to talk freely about the subject, but is kept to the point on issues of interest to the researcher. The respondent is encouraged to reveal everything that he/she feels and thinks about these points. The interviewer must note (or tape-record) all remarks that may be relevant and pursue them until he/she is satisfied that there is no more to be gained by further probing. Properly conducted, informal interviews can give the researcher an accurate feel for the subject to be surveyed. Focus groups, discussed later in this chapter, make use of relatively unstructured interviews.