Home Interviews Help Develop Measures Posted on March 19, 2007 In-home interviews help develop constructs, states Ruth Chao (bio).

Usually I like to do qualitative interviews, one-on-one qualitative interviews in the home with both the adolescent and the parent, and getting them to go in more depth about one particular construct in my study that I'm most interested in. So an example I'm very interested in parental control for immigrant Chinese. I had all these survey items for parental control, but how do they work in everyday life? How do parents talk about and negotiate control with adolescents? And how do adolescents make sense of the control?

Why do you think your parent did that? Was it reasonable? Unreasonable? So I can get at the kind of rationale, what kind of sense the adolescents, and what kind of justification from the parent’s point of view, what kind of justification the parents are providing.

So for me, what it did was it allowed me to have the depth and the whole broader meaning of some of these individual survey items in the measures to see, first of all, what it means to parents and adolescents and then also the everyday experiences around this construct.

« Back to Article