Importance Of Face To Face Interview

Introduction of the study

This is a research commissioned by the department of sociology at the University of British Columbia which studies the students’ decision making process on course choices in the faculty of arts. Undergraduate students in the arts faculty have the ability to choose their courses and making their own schedules every year, however there are certain constraints and restriction exist that may affect their choices, which are but not limited to: the faculty of arts requirements, the department requirements of different majors, the courses offered each year, and students’ own preferences. This study aims at finding both the subjective reasons of students’ decision making process over their course choices and the external …show more content…
A face-to-face interview method is employed in this project because of two reasons: first of all it helps us as the researchers to generate the descriptive data from the perspective of the participants about their own experience of choosing course; secondly, the face-to-face interview helps us as the researchers to keep the importance of the self-reflection in mind, always put our feet into the participants’ shoes and try to understand their choices in their own situations without putting too much …show more content…
Another issue is, since the participant had no previous experience over course enrollment in UBC, it narrowed her answers in a sense that she could only focus on the limited experience for the current academic term only. However it can also be seen as a advantage of her case in the study because it may help the department and the arts faculty to understand the students group in a more broader sense with the “uncommon” cases like this. One last issue showed in the interview is that the participant sometimes provided with answers that were out of my original expectations, and as a first-time interviewer I feel that more practices are needed in order to train myself to become a qualified qualitative researcher. Although one of the most important principles in conducting a face-to-face interview in qualitative research is making no assumption of the participants and I tried to follow that rule, there were still cases where I failed. Personally speaking, it is not a easy task to do the reflexivity entirely without asserting any personal biases or pre-assumptions when conducting and