100 9.10 Methods: Digital
Digital interviewing is becoming a popular method for initial contact with a prospective interviewee.
Advantages of digital interviews:
-
It is easy to establish basic information exchange without playing “phone tag”
-
Some interviewees are more comfortable and feel more in control of what they say by writing out a response to a question rather than saying something “off the cuff”
-
If the interviewee shares his/her social networking page, you have access to a lot of additional information about the person’s activities, friends/colleagues and preferences
Disadvantages:
-
It can be hard to ensure the person from whom you want the response is actually the one responding.
-
Visual and auditory clues are missing making the information gathered through the written word interview easier to misinterpret.
-
For surveys, digital requests for response can be seen as spam and either filtered or easily discarded