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Schedule as a Data Collection Technique in Research

Schedule is the tool or instrument used to collect data from the respondents while   interview is conducted. Schedule contains questions, statements (on which opinions are elicited) and blank spaces/tables for filling up the respondents. The features of schedules are :

  • The schedule is presented by the interviewer. The questions are asked and the answers are noted down by him.
  • The list of questions is a more formal document, it need not be attractive.
  • The schedule can be used in a very narrow sphere of social research.

The main purposes of schedule are three fold :

  • To provide a standardized tool for observation or interview in order to attain objectivity,
  • To act as memory tickler i.e., the schedule keeps the memory of the interviewer/ observer refreshed and keeps him reminded of the different aspects that are to be particularly observed, and
  • To facilitate the work of tabulation and analysis.

Types of Schedule

There are several kinds of schedule. Rating Schedules is a schedule used to obtain opinions, preferences etc, respondents over statements on the phenomenon studied. The schedule consists of positive and negative statements of opinion on the phenomenon. Documents Schedules are used to collect data/information from recorded evidences and/or case histories. Here the blanks, functional issues related blanks and the like to be filled up from records and documents are present. Survey Schedules are like questionnaires. Observation Schedules are schedules used when observational method of data collection is used. These could be structured or unstructured interview schedules are used for collecting data when interview method of communication with the respondents is used.

Essentials of a Good Schedule

A good schedule must have the following features

  • Content: Should cover questions or statements relating to all significant aspects of the study.
  • Dissectional: Should look into the problem analytically, dissecting every, major and significant components of the problem.
  • Context: Should suit the context in which it is applied. Different types of studies need different schedules.
  • Criterion: Should use sound logic in classifying respondents based opinions expressed.
  • Construction: Should be constructed in such a way that questions statements progress gradually and in order. Better it is sub-divided into parts, each part deeding with a certain sub topic of the issue studied. For each objective, a separate part may be devoted.
  • Language: Should be linguistically superbly designed. Clear and straight forward language be used.
  • Reliable: Should be reliable such that same results are obtained whenever the schedule is used when everything else remains same.
  • Mechanical Aspects: Paper used, margin space given, spacing, printing, size of letters, etc. should be normal.
  • Size: Should not too length nor too short. Should give fair coverage to the topic.
  • Qualities to be Avoided: Long, complex, presumptuous, personal, embarrassing, hypothetical issues, morality oriented, upsetting type and necessary questions must be avoided.

To sum up, accurate information and accurate response are the two essential conditions of a good schedule. Accurate communication is effected by proper wording of questions so as to produce desired sense without any ambiguity. Accurate response is said to have been achieved when replies contain the information sought for. The response is achieved by stimulating the respondents to fill the schedule. Besides, the physical structure of the schedule should be attractive; the questions asked or information sought should be adequate and relevant to the enquiry, so that final generalization may be based upon it. The information sought should not only be valid, it should also be capable of being tabulated and if possible being subjected to statistical analysis.

Procedure for Formulating a Schedule

  • Study the different aspects of the problem. The problem under study should first of all be split up into various aspects. The determination of these aspects will depend upon clear understanding of the problem under study.
  • Sub-divide the problem to get necessary information. Each aspect has again to be broken up into a number of sub-parts. These sub-parts should be quite exhaustive to give a full and complete picture of-the aspect under study.
  • Class questions. Care should be taken to see that the questions convey the exact sense. Respondents will be willing to supply information without any hesitation, bias or distortion of facts, if questions are exact and clear.
  • Serialization of Questions. In order to obtain well-organised information, it is necessary that the questions should be presented to the respondents in a well-ordered serial. It has been experienced to various field studies that the change in the order of questions affects the answers adversely.
  • Testing the validity of schedule. Whatever may be the degree of precaution taken, some slips are based to be left out and these can be located when the schedule is put into a reliability and validity test.
  • Division. The schedule be divided into adequate number of divisions. Introductory part, instructional part, issues related parts, etc. are certain parts by which the schedule is divided into parts.
  • Appropriate form of questions. Use appropriate forms of questions at appropriate places. Open ended, close ended, pictorial, Yes or No (Questions), multiple choice questions, etc. can be used.

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  • Key Differences

Know the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Questionnaire and Schedule

questionnaire vs schedule

The research process is incomplete without collection of data, which starts after identification of research problem and chalking out research design. The researcher should keep in mind that there are two types of data, i.e. primary and secondary data . There are several methods involved in the collection of primary data, like observation, interview, questionnaires, schedules, etc.

Content: Questionnaire Vs Schedule

Comparison chart, definition of questionnaire.

We define questionnaire as an instrument for research, which consists of a list of questions, along with the choice of answers, printed or typed in a sequence on a form used for acquiring specific information from the respondents. In general, questionnaires are delivered to the persons concerned either by post or mail, requesting them to answer the questions and return it. Informants are expected to read and understand the questions and reply in the space provided in the questionnaire itself.

The questionnaire is prepared in such a way that it translate the required information into a series of questions, that informants can and will answer. Further, it should be such that the respondent gets motivated and encouraged, to make him engaged in the interview and complete it. The merits of questionnaires are discussed below:

  • It is an inexpensive method, regardless of the size of the universe.
  • Free from the bias of the interviewer, as the respondents answer the questions in his own words.
  • Respondents have enough time to think and answer.
  • Due its large coverage, respondents living in distant areas can also be reached conveniently.

Definition of Schedule

The schedule is a proforma which contains a list of questions filled by the research workers or enumerators, specially appointed for the purpose of data collection. Enumerators go to the informants with the schedule, and ask them the questions from the set, in the sequence and record the replies in the space provided. There are certain situations, where the schedule is distributed to the respondents, and the enumerators assist them in answering the questions.

Enumerators play a major role in the collection of data, through schedules. They explain the aims and objects of the research to the respondents and interpret the questions to them when required. This method is little expensive as the selection, appointment and training of the enumerators require a huge amount. It is used in case of extensive enquiries conducted by the government agencies, big organisations. Most common example of data collection through schedule is population census.

Key Differences Between Questionnaire and Schedule

The important points of difference between questionnaire and schedule are as under:

  • Questionnaire refers to a technique of data collection which consist of a series of written questions along with alternative answers. The schedule is a formalised set of questions, statements, and spaces for answers, provided to the enumerators who ask questions to the respondents and note down the answers.
  • Questionnaires are delivered to the informants by post or mail and answered as specified in the cover letter. On the other hand, schedules are filled by the research workers, who interpret the questions to the respondents if necessary.
  • The response rate is low in case of questionnaires as many people do not respond and often return it without answering all the questions. On the contrary, the response rate is high, as they are filled by the enumerators, who can get answers to all the question.
  • The questionnaires can be distributed a large number of people at the same time, and even the respondents who are not approachable can also be reached easily. Conversely, in schedule method, the reach is relatively small, as the enumerators cannot be sent to a large area.
  • Data collection by questionnaire method is comparatively cheaper and economical as the money is invested only in the preparation and posting of the questionnaire. As against this, a large amount is spent on the appointment and training of the enumerators and also on the preparation of schedules.
  • In questionnaire method, it is not known that who answers the question whereas, in the case of schedule, the respondent’s identity is known.
  • The success of the questionnaire lies on the quality of the questionnaire while the honesty and competency of the enumerator determine the success of a schedule.
  • The questionnaire is usually employed only when the respondents literate and cooperative. Unlike schedule which can be used for data collection from all classes of people.

As everything has two aspects, so as with the case of questionnaire and schedule. The risk of collection of inaccurate and incomplete information is high in the questionnaire, as it might happen that people may not be able to understand the question correctly. On the contrary, schedule faces the risk of biases and cheating of the interviewer.

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survey

August 23, 2017 at 8:33 am

Excellently explained. Thank you so much. I always had doubts and confusions regarding these two. God bless you. Gracias.

Surbhi S says

August 23, 2017 at 9:49 am

Thanks for sharing your views with us and blessings as well.

sharnga says

December 2, 2017 at 11:47 am

best explained thanx a lot regards.. sharga

Monu singh rajawat says

January 19, 2018 at 7:03 pm

it is easy article for understanding and very nice for differentiate questionnaire and schedule.

Tabinda says

April 25, 2018 at 8:19 am

Thanks a lot for the information,as it helped me a lot…

October 5, 2018 at 12:27 am

Thanks really appreciate

Shikha says

January 3, 2022 at 9:03 pm

Thanks a lot for the information, as it helped me a lot…. Thank you so much

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12 Questionnaire and Schedule Method

Pa . Raajeswari

INTRODUCTION

A questionnaire and schedule is considered the heart of a survey work. Hence, it should be carefully constructed. Questionnaires are a method used to collect standardized data from large numbers of people. They are used to collect data in a statistical form. If it is not properly constructed, the survey will become difficult.

A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series of questions on other prompts for gathering information from respondents. Although they are often designed for statistical analysis of the responses, this is not always the case.

MEANING OF QUESTIONNAIRE

A questionnaire is a form prepared and distributed to secure responses to certain questions. It is a device for securing answers to questions by using a form which the respondent fills by himself. It is a systematic complication of questions and organised series of questions that are to be sent to the population samples. It is an important instrument in normative-survey research, being used to gather information from widely scattered sources. The questionnaire procedure normally comes into use where one cannot readily see personally all of the people from whom the research desires responses or where there is no particular reason to see them personally.

Purpose of questionnaire is twofold: i) to collect information from the respondents who are scattered in a vast area, ii) to achieve success in collecting reliable and dependable data.

FORMS OF QUESTIONNAIRE

Structured vs. non-structured . The structured contains definite, concrete and direct questions, whereas non-structured may consist of partially completed questions or statements.

A   non-structured questionnaire is often used as the interview guide, which is non-directive. The interviewer possesses only a blueprint of the enquiries and he is largely free to arrange the form or statements of the questions. The enquiries framed in a general form beforehand are given a specific form during the actual process of interview.

Closed form vs. open form : the question that call for short check responses are known as restricted or closed form type. They provide for making a yes or no, a short response, or checking an item out of a list of given responses. It restricts the choice of response for the respondent. He has simply to select a response out of supplied responses and has not to frame his response in his own way.

It is easy to fill out, takes less time, keeps the respondent on the subject, is relatively more objective, more acceptable and convenient to the respondent, and is fairly easy to tabulate and analyse.

The open-form, open-end or unrestricted type questionnaire calls for a free response in the respondent’s own words. The respondent frames and supplies his own response. No clues are provided. It probably provides for greater depth of response. The subject reveals his mind, gives his frame of reference and possibility the reasons for his responses

The mixed questionnaire: the mixed questionnaire consists of both close and open type questionnaires. For social research, this method is very useful. Many questionnaires include both open and closed type items. Each type has its specific merits and limitations and the research worker has to decide which type is more likely to supply the information he wants.

Fact and opinion questionnaire: questionnaire are also classified as: i) questionnaire of fact, which requires certain information of facts from the respondent without any reference to his opinion or attitude about them and ii) questionnaire of opinion and attitude in which the informant’s opinion, attitude or preference regarding some phenomena is sought.

Pictorial questionnaire: in the pictorial questionnaire, pictures are used to promote interest in answering questions. It is used extensively in studies of social attitudes and prejudices in children or illiterate persons. In a pictorial questionnaire, the selected alternative answers in the form of pictures are given and the respondent is required to tick the picture concerned. This questionnaire may be very useful for collecting data in a developing country like India, specially from the rural masses who are mostly illiterate and less knowledgeable. The serious limitation of this questionnaire is that it is lengthy in form. Also it is highly expensive.

In the questionnaire technique, great reliance is placed on the respondent’s verbal report for data on the stimuli or experiences to which he is exposed and for knowledge of his  behaviour. The questionnaire is effective only when the respondent is able or willing to express his reactions clearly. A good questionnaire can elicit cooperation of the respondent to get frank answers on almost any subject, even such personal matters as sex and income. Thus, it is clear that the respondent can judge the study only by what he can see. The questionnaire, by its very nature, is an impersonal technique and it is several pieces of paper appeals/persuades the respondent that he ought to participate.

RULES FOR CONSTRUCTING A QUESTIONNAIRE:

  • Clearly worded items(eg: avoid usually ,most)
  • Short questions
  • Only one idea(concept)per question
  • Avoid negatively worded items
  • Avoid technical language and jargon
  • Avoid leading questions(cues to answers)
  • Avoid lengthy questions

FORMULATION OF QUESTIONS AND FORMAT

If the types of measurements to be made are clearly known, then the researcher can formulate necessary questions relating to each measurement. While formulating a question, its content should be such that each respondent graphs the intention of the question very quickly as originally thought by the researcher. This will minimize the distortion of the research focus. In addition, the format of each question in relation to that of the overall questionnaire should be decided.

The following factors are to be considered before drafting the questionnaire.

  • Covering letter: The person conducting the survey should introduce himself to the respondents through a covering letter. In this covering letter,one can state the objectives of his study along with a formal request to fill up the questionnaire.
  • Number of questions: As far as possible, the number of questions should be limited. There should be no repetation of questions. The response from the respondents will be  poor if the numbers of questions are too many. Hence, care must be taken to minimise the number of questions.
  • Sequence of questions: The questions should be arranged in a logical order. The sequential arrangement of questions makes it easy for the respondents to make a spontaneous reply.  Eg: It is irrelevant to ask the number of children before asking whether the respondent is married or not.
  • Ambiguity of questions: The questions should be unambiguous, that is, questions should give only one meaning. There should be only one answer to a question. The question should focus on only one point.
  • Questions should be short and simple: The questions should not be lengthy. They must be short and easily understandable by the respondent. As far as possible technical terms should be avoided.
  • Personal questions: As far as possible, questions of personal and pecuniary nature should not be asked.  Eg: Questions about income, sales tax paid and the like may not be answered by respondents in writing. If this information is essential, if must be obtained by personal interviews. Therefore, these questions are to be avoided unless otherwise the study actually requires it.
  • Instructions to the informants: The questionnaire should provide necessary instructions to the informants. For example, it should specify the time within which it should be sent back and the address to which it should be sent. Instructions necessary to fill up the questions can also be given in the questionnaire.
  • Type of answer: As far as possible the answers for the questions should be objective type, that is ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ type questions are most welcome. However, when the alternative is not clear cut, the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions should be avoided.
  • Questions requiring calculations: Questions requiring calculation of ratios, percentages, and totals should not be asked as it may take much time and the respondents may feel reluctant.
  • Attraction: A questionnaire should be made to look as attractive as possible. The printing and paper used should be neat and qualitative. Enough space should be left for answering the questions.

QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN PROCESS:

STEP I: Determine survey objectives, resources and constraints

STEP II: Determine the data collection method

STEP III: Determine the question response format

STEP IV: Decide on the question wording

STEP V: Establish questionnaire flow and layout

STEP VI:Evaluate the questionnaire

STEP VII: obtain approval of all relevant parties

STEP VIII: Pre-test And Revise

STEP IX: Prepare and final copy

STEP X: Implement the survey

TYPES OF QUESTIONNAIRE

METHOD OF ADMINISTRATION

  • Self administered questionnaire: respondents fills in the questionnaire him/her self.
  • Schedule: the investigator/researched reads out the questions and records the respondents answers

ADVANTAGES OF QUESTIONNAIRE

  • The responses are gathered in a standardised way, so questionnaires are more objective, certainly more so than interviews.
  • Generally, it is relatively quick to collect information using a questionnaire. However, in some situations they can take a long time not only to design but also to apply and analyse.
  • Potentially information can be collected from a large portion of a group. This potential is not often realised, as returns from questionnaires are usually low. However, return rates can be dramatically improved if the questionnaire is delivered and responded to in class time.

DISADVANTAGES OF QUESTIONNAIRE

  • Questionnaires, like many evaluation methods occur after the event, so participants may forget important issues.
  • Questionnaires are standardised so it is not possible to explain any points in the questions that participants might misinterpret. This could be partially solved by piloting the questions on a small group of students or at least friends and colleagues. It is advisable to do this anyway.
  • Open-ended questions can generate large amounts of data that can take a long time to process and analyse. One way of limiting this would be to limit the space available to students so their responses are concise or to sample the students and survey only a portion of them.
  • Respondents may answer superficially especially if the questionnaire takes a long time to complete. The common mistake of asking too many questions should be avoided.
  • Students may not be willing to answer the questions. They might not wish to reveal the information or they might think that they will not benefit from responding perhaps even be penalised by giving their real opinion. Students should be told why the information is being collected and how the results will be beneficial. They should be asked to reply honestly and told that if their response is negative this is just as useful as a more positive opinion. If possible the questionnaire should be anonymous.

INTRODUCTION OF SCHEDULE

”The schedule is nothing more than a list of questions which it seems necessary to test the hypothesis”. A schedule is a structure of set of questions on a given topic which are asked by an interviewer is investigated personally. Schedule is the most important tool. It is similar to a questionnaire. It is administered by the researcher in person and it is filled up by the researcher. As the schedule is presented in person it need not be attractive. The techniques of preparing questionnaire are also applied to framing an interview schedule.

DEFINITION OF SCHEDULE

Schedule is also a set of questions which is filled in by investigator who is made responsible to collect information. The investigator approach to the respondent and record the responses of the respondent. In some cases respondent is encouraged to record the answers to the questions with the help of investigator.

The success of this method is based on selection and training of investigator, to collect information. Investigator must have competency for cross examination if necessary, investor’s personal qualities like honest hard work will improve the quality of the work. This system is very useful for extensive enquiries. It is very expensive still normally adapted by state and large organization. Census survey is conducted by this method.

MEANING OF SCHEDULE

Schedule and questionnaire are the most important tools generally used in social research. The two forms are similar in nature but the difference lies in its construction and usage. The schedule is the form containing some questions or blank tables which are to be filled by the research workers after getting information from the informants. The schedule  may thus contain two types of questions i) direct questions and ii) form of a table. There are some kinds of information that can be procured only by putting a question, e.g., questions for eliciting the informants opinion, attitude, preferences or his suggestions about some matter. There are others which may better be put in the form of tables.

From the above discussion the following salient points about schedule emerge:

  • The schedule is presented by the interviewer. The questions are asked and the answers are noted down by him.
  • The list of questions is a more formal document, it need not be attractive.
  • The schedule can be used in a very narrow sphere of social research.

PURPOSE OF SCHEDULE

The main purposes of schedule are three fold: i) to provide a standardized tool for observation or interview in order to attain objectivity. Ii) to act as memory ticker i.e., the schedule keeps the memory of the interviewer/observer refreshed and keeps him reminded of the different aspects that are to be particularly observed, iii) to facilitate the work of tabulation and analysis.

TYPES OF SCHEDULES

1.  Rating schedule

In the field of business guidance, psychological research, and social research, the rating schedules are used to assess the attitudes, opinions, preferences, inhibitions and other like elements. As evident from the term ‘rating’, in these schedules, the value and trend of the above mentioned qualities is measured.

2.   Documents schedule

The schedules of this type are used to obtain data regarding written evidence and case histories. In these schedules, those terms are included which occur frequency in documents and are to be generally found in case histories.

3.    Institutional surveys forms or evolutional schedules

The use of these schedules, as is evident from the name, is made to gather data about specialised institutions or agencies. The form and the size of evolutional  schedules is determined by the nature and the complexity of the problems of an institution, more complex the problem, bigger the size of the schedule.

4.    Observation schedules

In these schedules, observer records the activities and responses of an individual or a group under specific conditions. The observation schedules may need one or more research worker to be completed. The main purpose of an observation schedules is to verify some information.

5.   Interview schedules

A fifth form of schedule is sometimes treated independently and at other times considered included in the previous type. In an interview schedule, an interviewer presents the questions of the schedule to the interviewers and records their response on blank spaces.

STEPS IN FRAMING A SCHEDULE

1.    Study the different aspects of the problem

The problem under study should first of all be split up into various aspects. The determination of these aspects will depend upon clear understanding of the problem under study.

2.   Sub-divide the problem to get necessary information

Each aspect has again to be broken up into a number of sub-parts. These sub-parts should be quite exhaustive to give a full and complete picture of the aspect under study.

3.   The framing of actual questions.

Care should be taken to see that the questions convey the exact sense, are easily followed by the response and they will be willing to supply information without any hesitation, bias or distortion of facts.

4.    Serialisation of questions

In order to obtain well-organised information, it is necessary that the questions should be presented to the respondents in a well-ordered serial. It has been experienced in various field studies that the change in the order of questions affects the answers adversely.

5.    Testing the validity of schedule

Whatever may be the degree of precaution taken; some slips are bound to be left out and cannot be located unless the schedule has been put into operation.

HOW DO SCHEDULES WORK?

  • A rather expensive method as enumerators do not come cheap or resesrch scholar expenses often run high.
  • Schedules are filled by the enumerator/researcher who can also interpret the question if necessary.
  • Needless to say, the identity of the respondents  is known
  • Information collection is both assured and punctual
  • Questionnaires and schedules are flexible in what they can measure although they each have

SCHEDULING TOOL:

  •  A Tool which supports the scheduling method
  •  Identifying components names
  • Providing components definitions
  • Contains components relationships.
  • Is used to generate the project specific schedule model.
  • For eg: primavera, MS project, artemis, welcome, spider

ADVANTAGES OF SCHEDULE

1.Economical: since the questionnaire approach makes it possible to cover, at the same time, a large number of people spread over a large territory, it is decidedly more economical in terms of money, time and energy. Other methods do not afford such a facility.

2.Time saving: besides saving money, the mailed schedule also saves time. Simultaneously, hundreds of persons are approached through it whereas if they are to be interviewed it may take a very long time.

3.Suitable in special type of response: the information about certain problems can be best obtained through questionnaire method. For example, the research about sexual habits, marital relations, dreams etc, can be easily obtained by keeping the name of respondents anonymous.

4.Ensures anonymity: as the respondents are not required to indicate their names on the questionnaires, they feel free to express their views and opinions. Anonymity is a meaningful characteristic of questionnaire method. In view of its anonymity the questionnaire is more effective than an interview.

5.Less pressure on the respondents: the method places less pressure on the subject for immediate response and gives more time to the respondents for properly answering questions.

6.Uniformity: the questionnaire, by its very nature, is an impersonal technique. Uniformity from one measurement situation to another is provided by virtue of its standardised wordings of questions, standardised sequence of questions and fixed or standardised instructions for recording responses.

DISADVANTAGES OF SCHEDULE

Illiterate and less educated: one of the major limitations of the questionnaire is that it can be administered only on subjects with a considerable amount of education. Complex questionnaire requiring elaborate written replies can be used indeed on a very small percentage of population.

Proportion of returns is usually low: in a mailed questionnaire, the proportion of returns is usually low, it may sometimes be as low as 10%.

Mis-interprets/ unintelligible reply: in a questionnaire, if the respondent misinterprets a question or writes his reply unintelligibly, there is very little that can be done to correct this. In this approach there is no facility for repeating questions, explaining them or seeking clarification of a particular response.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SCHEDULE AND QUESTIONNAIRE

Questionnaire and Scheduleare the most important tool in the process of data collection. It is administered by the researcher in person and it is filled up by the researcher. As the schedule is presented in person it need not be attractive. The techniques of preparing questionnaire are also applied to framing an interview schedule. Hence, usually the researchers are advised to refer to the questionnaire for more details and concentrate in preparing questionnaire and schedule.

  • http://www.studylecturenotes.com/social-research-methodology/what-is-interview-schedule-definition-types
  • http://www.kkhsou.in/main/masscom/research_tool.html
  • https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/Schedule-and-Questionnaire-in-Research-Methodology
  • http://libweb.surrey.ac.uk/library/skills/Introduction%20to%20Research%20and%20Ma naging%20Information%20Leicester/page_51.htm
  • http://14.139.60.114:8080/jspui/bitstream/123456789/719/27/Methods%20of%20Data %20Collection.pdf

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schedule in research meaning

If you're unsure if your research proposal requires a schedule or work plan, please consult your project handbook and/or speak with your instructor, advisor, or supervisor.

The information about schedules or work plans in proposals was gathered from RRU thesis and major project handbooks, current in 2020, from programs in the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences, the Faculty of Management, and the College of Interdisciplinary Studies. If the details here differ from the information provided in the handbook for your project, please follow the handbook's directions.

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Home » Education » What is the Difference Between Questionnaire and Schedule

What is the Difference Between Questionnaire and Schedule

The main difference between questionnaire and schedule is that questionnaires consist of a set of open-ended or close-ended questions, whereas schedules contain a set of structured questions that are directly asked by the interviewer.

Although questionnaires and schedules are used as data collection tools in research studies, there are slight differences between questionnaires and schedules.

Key Areas Covered

1.  What is a Questionnaire       – Definition, Features  2.  What is a Schedule      – Definition, Features 3.  Difference Between Questionnaire and Schedule      – Comparison of Key Differences

Questionnaire, Schedule, Data Collection

Difference Between Questionnaire and Schedule - Comparison Summary

What is a Questionnaire

Questionnaires are used to gather information or data when conducting research. Questionnaires include different types of question forms that are related to respondents’ points of view: close-ended, open-ended, short form, long-form, etc. One of the important facts one should consider when forming questions for a questionnaire is that questions should always be unbiased. An effective questionnaire should also be simple and concise. Furthermore, a questionnaire should be specific to the topic and should consist of different types.

Compare Questionnaire and Schedule - What's the difference?

The use of questionnaires in research is considered a more feasible and efficient research method than in-depth interviews. There are many benefits of using questionnaires to gather data. Questionnaires save the time of respondents as well as the researcher. At the same time, the use of questionnaires allows the researcher to capture a larger audience, especially when compared to the use of in-depth interviews to gather data. Also, the researcher can print and distribute the questionnaires among respondents. Some researchers also distribute a soft copy of the questionnaires to the target audience. 

What is a Schedule

A schedule is a research tool to gather information and design a research study. A schedule consists of a set of structured questions on a specific topic. The interviewer directly asks these questions personally. When the respondents face issues in understanding the questions in a schedule, they can seek help from the interviewer to sort them out. A schedule contains well-structured questions, and those questions are asked by the interviewer, or else the respondents should write the answers to the questions in the presence of the interviewer.

Questionnaire vs Schedule

The questions in a schedule do not contain answer options; the respondents have to write or respond to the interviewer verbally. The data gathered in a schedule is qualitative . In a schedule, the order and the structure of the questions are significant, and the proper order of the questions cannot be changed. The use of a schedule is an expensive method to collect data because interviewers should be hired and trained for the purpose.

Similarities Between Questionnaire and Schedule

  • Both questionnaires and schedules are data collection tools.
  • Questionnaires and schedules consist of a set of questions to be asked from the respondents.

Differences Between Questionnaire and Schedule

A questionnaire is a structured data collection tool where choices may be given or may not be given, while a schedule consists of a set of structured questions on a particular topic that are directly asked by the interviewer.

Although a questionnaire may consist of open-ended questions and close-ended questions, questions in a schedule may not be composed of choices. The respondents must answer the questions in a schedule.

Questionnaires can cover a large audience easily, whereas schedules cover only a small set or small groups of people.

Although the use of questionnaires is cost-effective, the use of schedules in data collection is very expensive since the researcher should hire and train the interviewers on how to get the responses.

The respondents of a questionnaire can give their responses in the absence of the researcher, whereas in schedules, the respondents should provide their answers in the presence of the interviewer.

Respondents

Although respondents are assisted by the interviewer in clarifying the questions in a schedule, the respondents are not assisted when answering questionnaires.

The main difference between questionnaire and schedule is that questionnaire consists of a set of open-ended or close-ended questions, whereas a schedule contains a set of structured questions that are directly asked by the interviewer.

1. Amaresan, Swetha. “ 28 Questionnaire Examples, Questions, & Templates to Survey Your Clients .” HubSpot Blog, HubSpot, 23 May 2022. 2. “ Schedule .” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 May 2022.

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1. “ Musculoskeletal survey Nordic questionnaire ” By different – The Nordic questionnaire on ergonomic problems is Creative Commonds (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Commons Wikimedia 2. “ Women In Tech – 82 ” By WOCinTech Chat (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr

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Scheduling the scheduling task: a time-management perspective on scheduling

  • Original Article
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  • Published: 28 October 2017
  • Volume 20 , pages 1–10, ( 2018 )

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  • J. A. Larco 1 ,
  • J. C. Fransoo 2 &
  • V. C. S. Wiers   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3312-6553 2  

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The objective of this study was to characterize how schedulers spend their time interacting with external parties. Time is the most critical resource at the disposal of schedulers; however, its usage has been overlooked by prior empirical studies. Seven schedulers for a total of nineteen 8-h shifts were observed. Detailed time data about their activities and how these were interrupted were collected. Schedulers interrupt themselves significantly, and most of their activities are triggered externally. Despite this, schedulers are able to decide in most situations which activity to perform next. Schedulers spend more time on their informational role than on their decisional role, mostly at the requests of others, suggesting insufficient information system support to others in the organization. Schedulers other main role, besides making scheduling-related decisions, is to relay information. This implies that schedulers are subject to several external requests for activities. However, due to asynchronous communication that e-mails provide, they are still able to decide on their own schedule to do tasks. The methodology used can be used to evaluate an individual use of time, in particular for time critical such as scheduling. The analysis may provide insights as to how to improve the efficiency of such jobs.

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1 Introduction

The scheduling job has traditionally been addressed in the literature from the decision-making point of view. Schedulers, however, perform a diverse array of tasks including gathering and relaying information, monitoring the state of resources among others. The scheduling task is embedded in the organization (Crawford et al. 1999 ), making it highly complex and context dependent (Akkerman and Van Donk 2009 ). Scheduling is usually part of a production control structure, which encompasses planning, scheduling and dispatching (McKay and Wiers 2003 ). Traditional performance measures of schedulers have been focused on the quality of their product, i.e., the plans and schedules themselves. Nonetheless, a survey study by de Snoo et al. ( 2011 ) identified that performance metrics used in practice focus not only on the quality of the product, but on the process of scheduling itself, in particular to try to measure the timeliness of when the schedule is released.

The need for measuring timeliness suggests the time-critical nature of the scheduling function. Schedulers are immersed in a highly dynamic context where requests from the demand side (client representatives) or supply side (plants, transport) arrive and must be dealt with. It is up to the scheduler to decide when to react to these requests and when to engage in other tasks of preventive nature such as checking production orders and stock levels. The importance of characterizing the time-management dimension in the scheduling job has also been highlighted by Cegarra ( 2008 ) where the steadiness of the process, time pressure, cycle synchronicity and continuity of the process were all time-related aspects that affect the cognitive demands on the scheduler. Furthermore, such time-management decisions influence the productivity of the scheduler, in terms of the time spent on the scheduling task and the time that is left for enabling activities (Jackson et al. 2004 ) as well as the smoothing of workload that have been found to affect the quality of decisions (Gonzalez 2005 ).

However, despite its importance, in the scheduling practice there are no guidelines on time-management decisions, let alone how these decisions should be taken in different scheduling contexts. The same problem persists in the scheduling literature, where despite the elaborate vision of what the scheduling function entails (Fransoo et al. 2011 ), there has been no explicit consideration of the role of time on the execution of the scheduling job. As such, it is important to identify the locus of control of the scheduler in deciding how to organize his own time as a resource, distinguishing it from unavoidable external interruptions from the scheduler’s stakeholders.

Recognizing that the execution of tasks in the scheduler function does not follow clear stepwise patterns, our contribution to the literature is twofold. First, we contribute by characterizing the typical workflow of a scheduler, detailing the reasons behind the seemingly chaotic pattern of the daily timeline of a scheduler. Second, we contribute by specifying the extent to which scheduler can be in control of his time and how he can allocate his time among the different roles he serves.

2 Scheduling task time management: theory and hypotheses

Production scheduling is a well-studied domain: the first books on scheduling appeared almost half a century ago (e.g., Conway et al. 1967 ; Baker 1974 ), and since then, a vast amount of literature has been published on the topic of production scheduling (for an overview, see Pinedo ( 2005 ). Although most of the research has been carried out from an Operations Research perspective (Dessouky et al. 1995 ), there has been a growing interest for the human aspect of scheduling (Crawford and Wiers 2001 ; Fransoo et al. 2011 ). Models that describe the scheduling task have been proposed by various authors, such as Sanderson ( 1991 ), Wiers and Van Der Schaaf ( 1997 ), Wiers ( 1997 ), McKay and Buzacott ( 2000 ) and Jackson et al. ( 2004 ). Cegarra and Wezel ( 2011 ) present a review of models from the perspective of the objective of the model—either for designing decision support or for training.

An extensive study on modeling the scheduling task has been carried out by Jackson et al. ( 2004 ), who make a distinction between three kinds of scheduling activities or functions that a scheduler serves. Their model is shown in Fig.  1 .

Model of scheduling tasks and roles (Jackson et al. 2004 )

Firstly, there are the goal-oriented activities that include the formal tasks described on the scheduler function (i.e., scheduling itself) as well as other maintenance (e.g., data maintenance) and compensatory tasks (e.g., rescheduling) that support the formal tasks. Secondly, to enable the goal-oriented activities, the scheduler also fulfills enabling activities in a number of roles . These include a decisional role (e.g., production orders and use of extra time), a role in which information is received, used, researched and disseminated and an interpersonal role where relationships are built for gaining access to information, being able to relax constraints and ease implementation of schedules. Thirdly, the schedulers engage in monitoring , anticipating any problems and the need for rescheduling. To our knowledge, Jackson et al.’s model is the most comprehensive description of the scheduling task. However, the description is primarily qualitative and conceptual and does not take the perspective of time into account. Nevertheless, some of the qualitative descriptions in their work do suggest that the decisional role, often perceived to be the dominant scheduler’s activity, occupies a relatively small share of the time spent.

The model presented by Jackson suggests that the scheduling job consists of several tasks and roles that simultaneously require attention by the human scheduler. Some of these are initiated by the scheduler himself, while others are triggered by other persons or events. Conducting endogenously triggered activities and responding to exogenous requests compete for the same scarce time of the scheduler. The existing models do not make clear how schedulers deal with this time-management issue, in particular in the presence of stochastic events (e.g., resources failure, unexpected customer orders or interruptions by colleagues in other organizational functions) that may alter the scheduler’s workflow. In other words, time management in the scheduling task is an unexplored domain.

In a different stream of literature, Hopp et al. ( 2009 ) present a general framework that can be used to model time-related aspects of white-collar work (e.g., average waiting time, throughput). The framework is applicable also to the scheduling job as it fits their description of white-collar work (i.e., work that requires intellectual, problem-solving skills and often creativity). Indeed, schedulers have been described by McKay et al. ( 1989 ) as problem-solvers that also anticipate problems and often seek non-conventional solutions to problems that have not been faced before.

In the framework by Hopp et al., tasks (or work packages) are triggered by either of two types of entities (see Fig.  1 ): exogenous entities and endogenous entities. Note that the trigger entities are not the tasks themselves but the initiators of the tasks. Exogenous entities are external requests to the individual by any of his stakeholders. For example, in the scheduling context, an exogenous entity may be a request by a sales representative to be informed about the status of a customer order. Endogenous entities are internally generated items that are done at the initiative of the white-collar worker himself. An example of an endogenous entity is the initiative of a scheduler to conduct a check on the progress of the released production order to avoid any future capacity problems. The triggers, in turn, bring about tasks which, when executed, may generate value for different stakeholders. As the effects of these tasks are not seen immediately (Hopp et al. 2009 ), the value is then taken as latent (Fig.  2 ).

Individual white-collar framework (Hopp et al. 2009 )

The existing literature on scheduling task models has different views on the interruptive nature of the task. The model presented by Jackson et al. ( 2004 ) suggests that there are several tasks and roles competing for attention, whereas other models such as the one by McKay et al. ( 1989 ) seem to suggest that the scheduling task is executed according to a predefined flow, which is controlled by the scheduler. Nevertheless, McKay et al. ( 1989 ) indicate that dealing with unpredicted events is a major role for the human factor. In this paper, we therefore hypothesize that interruptions play a major role in the scheduling task and that schedulers can influence how they react on interruptions. In line with the model presented by Hopp et al. ( 2009 ), we expect that interruptions are both caused by external factors—exogenous interruptions—and by the human scheduler interrupting his own work—endogenous interruptions.

The considerations above lead to the following set of hypotheses that we investigate in this study.

Hypothesis 1

The number of interruptions in the scheduling task is not negligible; at least 10% of tasks are left unfinished due to interruptions.

Given the nature of the scheduling task as described by Jackson et al ( 2004 ) whereby several goals interact and compensation and maintenance activities take place, it is likely that new information and new requests arrive at random times during the scheduling job. The arrival intensity of such interruptions has not been documented in earlier studies. We hypothesize that the number of triggers is substantial and that consequently the scheduler is interrupted many times during the execution of his task at least in about 10% of tasks he undertakes.

Hypothesis 2

The tasks triggered exogenously are more frequent than self-initiated, endogenous tasks.

The model by Jackson et al. ( 2004 ) suggests that the scheduler is operating in substantial operational interaction with many others in the organization to fulfill in particular his informational and interpersonal roles. Even for the decisional roles, the scheduler is highly dependent on others in the organization, as the resulting schedule determines the work and associated performance of others in the organization, such as process operators. This type of function would suggest that the scheduler is often triggered and subsequently interrupted by others in the organization. In an operational environment, we expect these exogenous triggers and subsequent interruptions to still dominate over the endogenous interruptions initiated by the scheduler himself.

Hypothesis 3

The human scheduler has a major influence on how to deal with interruptions, being able to avoid them in most situations.

The impact of endogenous interruptions can be controlled by the scheduler: it is his decision whether to interrupt his current task and continue working on another (endogenous) task in his work queue. For exogenous interruptions, it is less clear: some of them they may be forcible, and some of them not. In some cases, the scheduler has no option but to interrupt his work, for example when someone enters his office and asks a question. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the majority of triggers come in by e-mail, which are regarded as unforced triggers, as the scheduler does not need to take immediate action. This assumption is in line with the results of a study in a knowledge work setting by Straub and Karahanna ( 1998 ), which identifies that workers are less likely to use asynchronous media such as e-mail for less urgent communication.

This effect is amplified by the trend to centralize the scheduling function in control towers (De Kok et al. 2015 ), thereby introducing a physical distance between sources of interruption and the scheduler. In such cases, most contact takes place via e-mail or telephone, and this has changed the nature of triggers, as an e-mail trigger is much less forcible than someone’s physical presence. Therefore, we hypothesize that the scheduler can exert considerable effort over the execution of his task, by avoiding task interruptions to a large extent.

Hypothesis 4

The human scheduler spends more time on his informational role than on his decisional role.

Jackson et al. ( 2004 ) qualitatively suggest that the informational role consumes most of the time of the scheduler. This is in line with other studies, which note the fact that scheduling has multiple stakeholders, implying a large number of requests from them with regard to information. However, this is yet to be verified with a time study where the time spent in each role is carefully registered (Fig.  3 ).

Task framework extended by triggers and interruptions

The above picture presents an extended version of the model by Hopp et al. ( 2009 ), which forms the basis for the stated hypotheses. Task triggers can be endogenous and exogenous, and these can interrupt a task, which is then put in an internal work-in-process queue, to be finalized later. Exogenous triggers can either forcibly or non-forcibly interrupt the scheduler. For example, requests that arrive by e-mail are non-forcibly interrupting tasks as the scheduler may decide when to read his e-mail and when to react to it. However, if a planner phones a scheduler, the scheduler is forced to interrupt his current task. In addition, it may occur that the scheduler decides to start new activities even if he has not finished the current one.

The internal work-in-progress of tasks increases with one unit when the scheduler is forcibly interrupted, decides to allow to be interrupted by non-forcibly interruptions or starts another self-initiated activity before finishing the current one. It is also possible that the scheduler cannot finish a task because he requires input from another party in which case, he needs to wait for a response from the other party in order to resume such a task.

3 Methodology

3.1 scheduling environment.

This paper reports a field study at a planning department of a Fortune 500 chemical corporation. In the planning department, 12 planners and 36 schedulers are colocated in a single facility. The planning department is a separate entity in the chemical corporation that provides planning and scheduling services to all European production and distribution facilities. The planning department is an example of the trend to centralize planning and scheduling operations, by colocating personnel in a single so-called control tower.

The objective of the schedulers in the planning department is twofold: first, to produce high-quality schedules and second, to provide timely feedback about the schedule to stakeholders in the organization, as a survey conducted in the planning department asking to rank their priorities has indicated. The goals of the schedulers involved in the study are in line with a study by De Snoo et al. ( 2011 ), who distinguish between product and process performance. de Snoo et al. ( 2011 ) conclude that 45% of the respondents think it is more important to provide quick responses to the schedulers’ stakeholders (i.e., responsiveness) than to optimize planning and scheduling decisions (i.e., optimization). If uncertainty of the scheduling environment is high (referred to by Wiers ( 1997 ) as “stress” shops), the percentage of respondents that considers responsiveness of a greater importance than optimization goes up to 55%. To understand the impact of the requirement to be responsive on the scheduling task, a better understanding is needed of time-management strategies as practiced by schedulers.

In the cases observed, requests and interactions of the scheduler with others in the organization involved a diverse array of stakeholders, including:

production and packaging plant managers, who are the main “users” of the schedules,

customer sales representatives, to coordinate the fulfillment of special customer orders,

marketing, which establishes production quotas in case demand systematically exceeds supply,

supply chain planners that set the long-term capacity indicating shutdown periods of production plants and determining from which plants to source regional European markets, and

logistics planners, in charge of arranging the transport of products from plants to the customer.

In a typical company, only a small number of human schedulers can be studied. Therefore, most studies on human scheduling are based on a one or a couple of schedulers per company who are studied in-depth. For example, Jackson et al. ( 2004 ) report findings on seven schedulers distributed over four companies; this distribution makes gathering detailed observational data in a unified format very difficult.

The company that has been studied for this paper has the advantage of having a Control Tower structure, which means that schedulers that are responsible for different plants are grouped together physically in one location, using the same procedures and information systems to execute their work. At the same time, the subjects were operating in different scheduling environments; this makes the conclusions of the analysis to be more context-free and thus generalizable to other dynamic scheduling settings. Within this Control Tower, a total of 21 schedulers were active. From this group, eight schedulers have been included in the study. Criteria for inclusion were that they all had at least 3 months of experience on the job and were available at the days of observation. For reasons of availability, not all the schedulers were able to be observed the same number of days; however, each scheduler was observed for at least two shifts. A total of 19 scheduler-shifts were observed.

Five of the subjects worked in a predominantly “make-to-stock” environment, and four schedulers worked in a predominantly “make-to-order” environment. There was diversity also in terms of the number of products, or Stock Keeping Units, scheduled by the eight schedulers studied, ranging from 20 to 500. In addition, the number of plants scheduled by the observed scheduler was diverse, ranging from one to four production plants. The geographical scope of the customer base addressed by each scheduler also varied widely from regional to global (Table  1 ).

3.3 Data coding

The objective of the data coding is to unify the method of data collection by using an agreed and unambiguous coding scheme. This way, the data collection is objectified between the four researchers that were involved in the data collection process. The recorded variables include the starting and finishing times of the task, a description of the task and its classification, an ID of the task to identify a task that is later resumed and finally an indication of the workflow. (Whether the task is finished, interrupted, self-interrupted or could not continue because it needed an input of third party.) The process to achieve this coding scheme is described below.

In a first site visit, the lead researcher observed two consecutive complete shifts of a scheduler. The researcher then developed a preliminary coding scheme to generate a classification of tasks according to the domain that effectively standardizes the task content description.

In a second site visit, each of the four researchers involved in the study was assigned to a given scheduler to observe its job as a pilot observation day, using the preliminary coding scheme. The last 3 h of the pilot day, the four researchers tested the applicability and completeness of the preliminary scheme developed by the lead researcher on the first visit during a debrief session with the scheduler involved and subsequently with the other researchers. During the debrief session, the completeness of the options, the ease to fill-in the scheme in a spreadsheet and the definition of what a task is, were all discussed and modifications were agreed upon. In particular, the coding spreadsheet was simplified to record tasks in a sufficiently quick way to follow the scheduler’s workflow. Also, the task granularity was established consistent with Hopp et al. ( 2009 ) conceptualization of a task: a single task is finished with a deliverable to a stakeholder (e.g., a schedule, an instruction, a report, an information e-mail, call or chat).

The data coding scheme that was used for the observation studies had the following information: tasks that were exogenously triggered were identified by an R and tasks that were endogenously triggered were identified with an A, as shown in “ Appendix .”

3.4 Data collection

We rely on in situ observational data collected directly by four researchers using the predefined scheme discussed above to classify the scheduling roles. The data coding has been implemented in a spreadsheet, and the codes, description and start/end time were entered by the observer. An example of raw observation data is listed in Table  2 .

In total, 1595 entries were recorded by the observers. (Note that the number of observations is larger than the number of tasks, as some are interrupted and potentially resumed.) Our unit of analysis is the scheduling shift with a sample of 19, 8-h shifts. Although the sample is small, the large number of activities reduces the variance of summary statistics per day. When a task would be interrupted, a recurrent indicator would be recorded by the observer, so that when the task was resumed in a future observation, a reference indicated at which initial observation the task started.

Given that the data observed was mostly objective and not subject to the interpreter, the researcher had only limited influence in the data: namely in classifying a task and in considering whether a task was finished or not. At the same time, the need to minimize the impact of the researcher on the scheduler work made it impractical to have more than one researcher observing the same scheduler day; hence, no inter-rater reliability measure could be obtained.

To control for such influence, the pairing of researcher to scheduler was randomly made. In this way, Researcher 1 was assigned to Schedulers 4 and 6, Researcher 2 was assigned to Schedulers 1 and 7, Researcher 3 was assigned to Schedulers 2 and 8, and Researcher 4 was assigned to Schedulers 3 and 5. In addition, at the end of the scheduling day, researchers reviewed each other’s match between the long description of an activity and its classification. Less than 2% of the activity entries were contested, and for such cases, a consensus was reached.

4.1 Interruption statistics

Table  3 shows the summary statistics on number of tasks finished and percentage of tasks interrupted on a scheduling day. Across, the 19 scheduling days studied; on average, 25.2% of tasks started could not be finished before being interrupted. This means that Hypothesis 1 is strongly supported ( p  < 0.001) as on a normal scheduler day more than 10% of tasks are interrupted ( M  = 25.2%, SE = 1.12%).

However, when exploring the origin of interruptions, Table  4 shows that most interruptions in the case studied were self-initiated rather than exogenously triggered.

This means there is strong evidence to support Hypothesis 3, where using a related means t test, we find that on a typical scheduling day, there are statistically significant more interruptions triggered endogenously than exogenously [ t (18) = 4.70, p  < 0.001].

Contrary to what might be subjectively thought by the schedulers themselves, Table  4 shows that in most tasks triggered, the schedulers are more often in control of the work flow than not ( M  = 84.8 > 50%, SE = 3.07%), thus supporting Hypothesis 4 [ t (18) = 3.01, p  < 0.01]. Table  4 shows two reasons behind this fact. Firstly, the scheduler is in control for all the tasks triggered endogenously; these account for 44% of the total. Secondly, when tasks are triggered exogenously, the scheduler is mostly only in control of his time; only when there is a face-to-face communication or phone calls are received, he is forcibly interrupted.

The source of triggers was further explored. The results indicate that indeed most of the endogenous triggers (self-interruptions) was for actually reading e-mail and updating the knowledge state of the scheduler. Next in importance was to attend to requests for information of Customer Sales Representatives, arguably the most important stakeholder of the scheduler. Interestingly, the main source of exogenous interruptions was responding to requests from peers from help, highlighting the role of control centers to facilitate learning processes. Taken as a whole, the results show that tasks that relate to the informational role are the main driver for schedulers’ workflow (Table  5 ).

4.2 Task statistics

In analyzing the nature of tasks performed by different schedulers, a large degree of variation can be observed in terms of the number of tasks accomplished for specific type of tasks as evidenced by the large coefficients listed in Table  6 . These results reflect the different contexts that the schedulers are subject to. For example, some schedulers have to manage more stock keeping units to manage and thus have to monitor stocks more frequently; other schedulers deal with older plants that breakdown more often and thus need more attention in monitoring the execution of production orders. At the same time, the complexity of each task varies widely, implying that some scheduling environments imply a large number of tasks that take less time than others.

To observe emerging patterns, we take two approaches: cluster data and focus on time spent. We then group the tasks according to the scheduler role they are related to, using the model presented in Jackson et al. ( 2004 ) as a basis. To group the tasks, the standardized description of the tasks was then associated in a one-to-one mapping with the role it serves. So, for instance, any task that involves scheduling or rescheduling was to be considered as serving the decisional role, whereas any task that involves checking stocks or production orders was to be considered as serving the monitoring role. The observations are grouped into roles as follows:

In the decisional role, the scheduler makes decisions about the schedule, including the production sequence and the choice for a specific resource. In the classical definition of scheduling, this role is seen as the most important (the only) part of scheduling (McKay and Wiers 1999 ).

In the monitoring role, the scheduler keeps an eye on several aspects of the involved resources: stock movements and demand, production execution (in tailor-made systems per plant), truck deliveries and raw materials stocks (in an Enterprise Resource Planning software).

In the informational role, we include two tasks modalities, when the scheduler uses external information from external parties by directly requesting this or when the scheduler uses internal information. Notice that the scheduler also generates information, but this is typically part of another task such as scheduling and thereby difficult to distinguish clearly.

In the transactional role, the scheduler conducts tasks that are part of the procedures of the business. For example: to arrange a delivery note to transport a customer order, or updating the master data with a new stock keeping unit. We have identified this role in addition to the roles detailed in Jackson et al. ( 2004 ).

Mapping the standardized description of the task to the corresponding role served, the time spent to these roles is given in Table  7 .

In Table  7 , it can be shown that in the case studied, schedulers spent significantly more time on an informational role than on a decisional role using a related means t test [ t (18) = 4.17, p  < 0.001], providing strong support for Hypothesis 4.

5 Discussion

From the number of interruptions reported in Table  3 , it becomes clear that about one quarter of the tasks are interrupted, either by the scheduler himself, or by being forcibly interrupted by others. From this finding, we conclude that a significant fraction of tasks is interrupted, supporting Hypothesis 1. Following this result, we conclude that time management is a critical skill for the productivity and response time of a scheduler, as it is the scheduler who decides in most cases what task deserves attention.

Indeed, Table  4 shows that most interruptions are self-initiated, supporting Hypothesis 2. Exploring the personality factors and other determinants of self-interruptions may be important to recommend best recruiting and communication policies in the scheduling function. Thus, the message to schedulers may be clear: try as much as possible to finish the task that already has been started before switching to another task, as precious time will be lost for every interruption.

Table  4 also shows that for an average of 84.5% of the triggers, the scheduler can decide when to start a task, counting all endogenous triggers and exogenous triggers of non-forcible nature (via e-mail). Therefore, a counterintuitive hypothesis is supported (Hypothesis 3); in most occasions, the scheduler can control his workflow.

Another important result is the fact that in the case studied, more time is spent on the information role than on the decisional role as listed in Table  7 (Hypothesis 4). This result is important, as scheduling has been studied mainly from the point of view of its decisional role. Similarly, most efforts for improving the scheduling function have been focused on the scheduling role itself. Underpinning the task model presented by Jackson et al. ( 2004 ) with quantitative data provides both academia and practice with the important finding that efforts to improve scheduling should include the informational role.

This case study is unique in taking the exhaustive approach of registering every single activity a scheduler performs along regular days. Although it is limited in the small sample of scheduler days collected (19), this is counterbalanced by the fact that in a single day many tasks are performed (an average of 55 tasks) and that the emerging results analyzed are particularly clear, resulting in low variance for most statistical tests. Further research should investigate new forms of gathering daily information in a noninvasive ways.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is a partial result of the project 4C4-More, which is supported by Dinalog, Dutch Institute for Advanced Logistics.

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Larco, J.A., Fransoo, J.C. & Wiers, V.C.S. Scheduling the scheduling task: a time-management perspective on scheduling. Cogn Tech Work 20 , 1–10 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-017-0443-1

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The Interview Method In Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

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Saul Mcleod, Ph.D., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years experience of working in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Interviews involve a conversation with a purpose, but have some distinct features compared to ordinary conversation, such as being scheduled in advance, having an asymmetry in outcome goals between interviewer and interviewee, and often following a question-answer format.

Interviews are different from questionnaires as they involve social interaction. Unlike questionnaire methods, researchers need training in interviewing (which costs money).

Multiracial businesswomen talk brainstorm at team meeting discuss business ideas together. Diverse multiethnic female colleagues or partners engaged in discussion. Interview concept

How Do Interviews Work?

Researchers can ask different types of questions, generating different types of data . For example, closed questions provide people with a fixed set of responses, whereas open questions allow people to express what they think in their own words.

The researcher will often record interviews, and the data will be written up as a transcript (a written account of interview questions and answers) which can be analyzed later.

It should be noted that interviews may not be the best method for researching sensitive topics (e.g., truancy in schools, discrimination, etc.) as people may feel more comfortable completing a questionnaire in private.

There are different types of interviews, with a key distinction being the extent of structure. Semi-structured is most common in psychology research. Unstructured interviews have a free-flowing style, while structured interviews involve preset questions asked in a particular order.

Structured Interview

A structured interview is a quantitative research method where the interviewer a set of prepared closed-ended questions in the form of an interview schedule, which he/she reads out exactly as worded.

Interviews schedules have a standardized format, meaning the same questions are asked to each interviewee in the same order (see Fig. 1).

interview schedule example

   Figure 1. An example of an interview schedule

The interviewer will not deviate from the interview schedule (except to clarify the meaning of the question) or probe beyond the answers received.  Replies are recorded on a questionnaire, and the order and wording of questions, and sometimes the range of alternative answers, is preset by the researcher.

A structured interview is also known as a formal interview (like a job interview).

  • Structured interviews are easy to replicate as a fixed set of closed questions are used, which are easy to quantify – this means it is easy to test for reliability .
  • Structured interviews are fairly quick to conduct which means that many interviews can take place within a short amount of time. This means a large sample can be obtained, resulting in the findings being representative and having the ability to be generalized to a large population.

Limitations

  • Structured interviews are not flexible. This means new questions cannot be asked impromptu (i.e., during the interview), as an interview schedule must be followed.
  • The answers from structured interviews lack detail as only closed questions are asked, which generates quantitative data . This means a researcher won’t know why a person behaves a certain way.

Unstructured Interview

Unstructured interviews do not use any set questions, instead, the interviewer asks open-ended questions based on a specific research topic, and will try to let the interview flow like a natural conversation. The interviewer modifies his or her questions to suit the candidate’s specific experiences.

Unstructured interviews are sometimes referred to as ‘discovery interviews’ and are more like a ‘guided conservation’ than a strictly structured interview. They are sometimes called informal interviews.

Unstructured interviews are most useful in qualitative research to analyze attitudes and values. Though rarely provide a valid basis for generalization, their main advantage is that they enable the researcher to probe social actors’ subjective point of view.

Interviewer Self-Disclosure

Interviewer self-disclosure involves the interviewer revealing personal information or opinions during the research interview. This may increase rapport but risks changing dynamics away from a focus on facilitating the interviewee’s account.

In unstructured interviews, the informal conversational style may deliberately include elements of interviewer self-disclosure, mirroring ordinary conversation dynamics.

Interviewer self-disclosure risks changing the dynamics away from facilitation of interviewee accounts. It should not be ruled out entirely but requires skillful handling informed by reflection.

  • An informal interviewing style with some interviewer self-disclosure may increase rapport and participant openness. However, it also increases the chance of the participant converging opinions with the interviewer.
  • Complete interviewer neutrality is unlikely. However, excessive informality and self-disclosure risks the interview becoming more an ordinary conversation and producing consensus accounts.
  • Overly personal disclosures could also be seen as irrelevant and intrusive by participants. They may invite increased intimacy on uncomfortable topics.
  • The safest approach seems to be to avoid interviewer self-disclosures in most cases. Where an informal style is used, disclosures require careful judgment and substantial interviewing experience.
  • If asked for personal opinions during an interview, the interviewer could highlight the defined roles and defer that discussion until after the interview.
  • Unstructured interviews are more flexible as questions can be adapted and changed depending on the respondents’ answers. The interview can deviate from the interview schedule.
  • Unstructured interviews generate qualitative data through the use of open questions. This allows the respondent to talk in some depth, choosing their own words. This helps the researcher develop a real sense of a person’s understanding of a situation.
  • They also have increased validity because it gives the interviewer the opportunity to probe for a deeper understanding, ask for clarification & allow the interviewee to steer the direction of the interview, etc. Interviewers have the chance to clarify any questions of participants during the interview.
  • It can be time-consuming to conduct an unstructured interview and analyze the qualitative data (using methods such as thematic analysis).
  • Employing and training interviewers is expensive and not as cheap as collecting data via questionnaires . For example, certain skills may be needed by the interviewer. These include the ability to establish rapport and knowing when to probe.
  • Interviews inevitably co-construct data through researchers’ agenda-setting and question-framing. Techniques like open questions provide only limited remedies.

Focus Group Interview

Focus group interview is a qualitative approach where a group of respondents are interviewed together, used to gain an in‐depth understanding of social issues.

This type of interview is often referred to as a focus group because the job of the interviewer ( or moderator ) is to bring the group to focus on the issue at hand. Initially, the goal was to reach a consensus among the group, but with the development of techniques for analyzing group qualitative data, there is less emphasis on consensus building.

The method aims to obtain data from a purposely selected group of individuals rather than from a statistically representative sample of a broader population.

The role of the interview moderator is to make sure the group interacts with each other and do not drift off-topic. Ideally, the moderator will be similar to the participants in terms of appearance, have adequate knowledge of the topic being discussed, and exercise mild unobtrusive control over dominant talkers and shy participants.

A researcher must be highly skilled to conduct a focus group interview. For example, the moderator may need certain skills, including the ability to establish rapport and know when to probe.

  • Group interviews generate qualitative narrative data through the use of open questions. This allows the respondents to talk in some depth, choosing their own words. This helps the researcher develop a real sense of a person’s understanding of a situation. Qualitative data also includes observational data, such as body language and facial expressions.
  • Group responses are helpful when you want to elicit perspectives on a collective experience, encourage diversity of thought, reduce researcher bias, and gather a wider range of contextualized views.
  • They also have increased validity because some participants may feel more comfortable being with others as they are used to talking in groups in real life (i.e., it’s more natural).
  • When participants have common experiences, focus groups allow them to build on each other’s comments to provide richer contextual data representing a wider range of views than individual interviews.
  • Focus groups are a type of group interview method used in market research and consumer psychology that are cost – effective for gathering the views of consumers .
  • The researcher must ensure that they keep all the interviewees” details confidential and respect their privacy. This is difficult when using a group interview. For example, the researcher cannot guarantee that the other people in the group will keep information private.
  • Group interviews are less reliable as they use open questions and may deviate from the interview schedule, making them difficult to repeat.
  • It is important to note that there are some potential pitfalls of focus groups, such as conformity, social desirability, and oppositional behavior, that can reduce the usefulness of the data collected.
For example, group interviews may sometimes lack validity as participants may lie to impress the other group members. They may conform to peer pressure and give false answers.

To avoid these pitfalls, the interviewer needs to have a good understanding of how people function in groups as well as how to lead the group in a productive discussion.

Semi-Structured Interview

Semi-structured interviews lie between structured and unstructured interviews. The interviewer prepares a set of same questions to be answered by all interviewees. Additional questions might be asked during the interview to clarify or expand certain issues.

In semi-structured interviews, the interviewer has more freedom to digress and probe beyond the answers. The interview guide contains a list of questions and topics that need to be covered during the conversation, usually in a particular order.

Semi-structured interviews are most useful to address the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ research questions. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses can be performed on data collected during semi-structured interviews.

  • Semi-structured interviews allow respondents to answer more on their terms in an informal setting yet provide uniform information making them ideal for qualitative analysis.
  • The flexible nature of semi-structured interviews allows ideas to be introduced and explored during the interview based on the respondents’ answers.
  • Semi-structured interviews can provide reliable and comparable qualitative data. Allows the interviewer to probe answers, where the interviewee is asked to clarify or expand on the answers provided.
  • The data generated remain fundamentally shaped by the interview context itself. Analysis rarely acknowledges this endemic co-construction.
  • They are more time-consuming (to conduct, transcribe, and analyze) than structured interviews.
  • The quality of findings is more dependent on the individual skills of the interviewer than in structured interviews. Skill is required to probe effectively while avoiding biasing responses.

The Interviewer Effect

Face-to-face interviews raise methodological problems. These stem from the fact that interviewers are themselves role players, and their perceived status may influence the replies of the respondents.

Because an interview is a social interaction, the interviewer’s appearance or behavior may influence the respondent’s answers. This is a problem as it can bias the results of the study and make them invalid.

For example, the gender, ethnicity, body language, age, and social status of the interview can all create an interviewer effect. If there is a perceived status disparity between the interviewer and the interviewee, the results of interviews have to be interpreted with care. This is pertinent for sensitive topics such as health.

For example, if a researcher was investigating sexism amongst males, would a female interview be preferable to a male? It is possible that if a female interviewer was used, male participants might lie (i.e., pretend they are not sexist) to impress the interviewer, thus creating an interviewer effect.

Flooding interviews with researcher’s agenda

The interactional nature of interviews means the researcher fundamentally shapes the discourse, rather than just neutrally collecting it. This shapes what is talked about and how participants can respond.
  • The interviewer’s assumptions, interests, and categories don’t just shape the specific interview questions asked. They also shape the framing, task instructions, recruitment, and ongoing responses/prompts.
  • This flooding of the interview interaction with the researcher’s agenda makes it very difficult to separate out what comes from the participant vs. what is aligned with the interviewer’s concerns.
  • So the participant’s talk ends up being fundamentally shaped by the interviewer rather than being a more natural reflection of the participant’s own orientations or practices.
  • This effect is hard to avoid because interviews inherently involve the researcher setting an agenda. But it does mean the talk extracted may say more about the interview process than the reality it is supposed to reflect.

Interview Design

First, you must choose whether to use a structured or non-structured interview.

Characteristics of Interviewers

Next, you must consider who will be the interviewer, and this will depend on what type of person is being interviewed. There are several variables to consider:

  • Gender and age : This can greatly affect respondents’ answers, particularly on personal issues.
  • Personal characteristics : Some people are easier to get on with than others. Also, the interviewer’s accent and appearance (e.g., clothing) can affect the rapport between the interviewer and interviewee.
  • Language : The interviewer’s language should be appropriate to the vocabulary of the group of people being studied. For example, the researcher must change the questions’ language to match the respondents’ social background” age / educational level / social class/ethnicity, etc.
  • Ethnicity : People may have difficulty interviewing people from different ethnic groups.
  • Interviewer expertise should match research sensitivity – inexperienced students should avoid interviewing highly vulnerable groups.

Interview Location

The location of a research interview can influence the way in which interviewer and interviewee relate and may exaggerate a power dynamic in one direction or another. It is usual to offer interviewees a choice of location as part of facilitating their comfort and encouraging participation.

However, the safety of the interviewer is an overriding consideration and, as mentioned, a minimal requirement should be that a responsible person knows where the interviewer has gone and when they are due back.

Remote Interviews

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated remote interviewing for research continuity. However online interview platforms provide increased flexibility even under normal conditions.

They enable access to participant groups across geographical distances without travel costs or arrangements. Online interviews can be efficiently scheduled to align with researcher and interviewee availability.

There are practical considerations in setting up remote interviews. Interviewees require access to internet and an online platform such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Skype through which to connect.

Certain modifications help build initial rapport in the remote format. Allowing time at the start of the interview for casual conversation while testing audio/video quality helps participants settle in. Minor delays can disrupt turn-taking flow, so alerting participants to speak slightly slower than usual minimizes accidental interruptions.

Keeping remote interviews under an hour avoids fatigue for stare at a screen. Seeking advanced ethical clearance for verbal consent at the interview start saves participant time. Adapting to the remote context shows care for interviewees and aids rich discussion.

However, it remains important to critically reflect on how removing in-person dynamics may shape the co-created data. Perhaps some nuances of trust and disclosure differ over video.

Vulnerable Groups

The interviewer must ensure that they take special care when interviewing vulnerable groups, such as children. For example, children have a limited attention span, so lengthy interviews should be avoided.

Developing an Interview Schedule

An interview schedule is a list of pre-planned, structured questions that have been prepared, to serve as a guide for interviewers, researchers and investigators in collecting information or data about a specific topic or issue.
  • List the key themes or topics that must be covered to address your research questions. This will form the basic content.
  • Organize the content logically, such as chronologically following the interviewee’s experiences. Place more sensitive topics later in the interview.
  • Develop the list of content into actual questions and prompts. Carefully word each question – keep them open-ended, non-leading, and focused on examples.
  • Add prompts to remind you to cover areas of interest.
  • Pilot test the interview schedule to check it generates useful data and revise as needed.
  • Be prepared to refine the schedule throughout data collection as you learn which questions work better.
  • Practice skills like asking follow-up questions to get depth and detail. Stay flexible to depart from the schedule when needed.
  • Keep questions brief and clear. Avoid multi-part questions that risk confusing interviewees.
  • Listen actively during interviews to determine which pre-planned questions can be skipped based on information the participant has already provided.

The key is balancing preparation with flexibility to adapt questions based on each interview interaction. With practice, you’ll gain skills to conduct productive interviews that obtain rich qualitative data.

The Power of Silence

Strategic use of silence is a key technique to generate interviewee-led data, but it requires judgment about appropriate timing and duration to maintain mutual understanding.
  • Unlike ordinary conversation, the interviewer aims to facilitate the interviewee’s contribution without interrupting. This often means resisting the urge to speak at the end of the interviewee’s turn construction units (TCUs).
  • Leaving a silence after a TCU encourages the interviewee to provide more material without being led by the interviewer. However, this simple technique requires confidence, as silence can feel socially awkward.
  • Allowing longer silences (e.g. 24 seconds) later in interviews can work well, but early on even short silences may disrupt rapport if they cause misalignment between speakers.
  • Silence also allows interviewees time to think before answering. Rushing to re-ask or amend questions can limit responses.
  • Blunt backchannels like “mm hm” also avoid interrupting flow. Interruptions, especially to finish an interviewee’s turn, are problematic as they make the ownership of perspectives unclear.
  • If interviewers incorrectly complete turns, an upside is it can produce extended interviewee narratives correcting the record. However, silence would have been better to let interviewees shape their own accounts.

Recording & Transcription

Design choices.

Design choices around recording and engaging closely with transcripts influence analytic insights, as well as practical feasibility. Weighing up relevant tradeoffs is key.
  • Audio recording is standard, but video better captures contextual details, which is useful for some topics/analysis approaches. Participants may find video invasive for sensitive research.
  • Digital formats enable the sharing of anonymized clips. Additional microphones reduce audio issues.
  • Doing all transcription is time-consuming. Outsourcing can save researcher effort but needs confidentiality assurances. Always carefully check outsourced transcripts.
  • Online platform auto-captioning can facilitate rapid analysis, but accuracy limitations mean full transcripts remain ideal. Software cleans up caption file formatting.
  • Verbatim transcripts best capture nuanced meaning, but the level of detail needed depends on the analysis approach. Referring back to recordings is still advisable during analysis.
  • Transcripts versus recordings highlight different interaction elements. Transcripts make overt disagreements clearer through the wording itself. Recordings better convey tone affiliativeness.

Transcribing Interviews & Focus Groups

Here are the steps for transcribing interviews:
  • Play back audio/video files to develop an overall understanding of the interview
  • Format the transcription document:
  • Add line numbers
  • Separate interviewer questions and interviewee responses
  • Use formatting like bold, italics, etc. to highlight key passages
  • Provide sentence-level clarity in the interviewee’s responses while preserving their authentic voice and word choices
  • Break longer passages into smaller paragraphs to help with coding
  • If translating the interview to another language, use qualified translators and back-translate where possible
  • Select a notation system to indicate pauses, emphasis, laughter, interruptions, etc., and adapt it as needed for your data
  • Insert screenshots, photos, or documents discussed in the interview at the relevant point in the transcript
  • Read through multiple times, revising formatting and notations
  • Double-check the accuracy of transcription against audio/videos
  • De-identify transcript by removing identifying participant details

The goal is to produce a formatted written record of the verbal interview exchange that captures the meaning and highlights important passages ready for the coding process. Careful transcription is the vital first step in analysis.

Coding Transcripts

The goal of transcription and coding is to systematically transform interview responses into a set of codes and themes that capture key concepts, experiences and beliefs expressed by participants. Taking care with transcription and coding procedures enhances the validity of qualitative analysis .
  • Read through the transcript multiple times to become immersed in the details
  • Identify manifest/obvious codes and latent/underlying meaning codes
  • Highlight insightful participant quotes that capture key concepts (in vivo codes)
  • Create a codebook to organize and define codes with examples
  • Use an iterative cycle of inductive (data-driven) coding and deductive (theory-driven) coding
  • Refine codebook with clear definitions and examples as you code more transcripts
  • Collaborate with other coders to establish the reliability of codes

Ethical Issues

Informed consent.

The participant information sheet must give potential interviewees a good idea of what is involved if taking part in the research.

This will include the general topics covered in the interview, where the interview might take place, how long it is expected to last, how it will be recorded, the ways in which participants’ anonymity will be managed, and incentives offered.

It might be considered good practice to consider true informed consent in interview research to require two distinguishable stages:

  • Consent to undertake and record the interview and
  • Consent to use the material in research after the interview has been conducted and the content known, or even after the interviewee has seen a copy of the transcript and has had a chance to remove sections, if desired.

Power and Vulnerability

  • Early feminist views that sensitivity could equalize power differences are likely naive. The interviewer and interviewee inhabit different knowledge spheres and social categories, indicating structural disparities.
  • Power fluctuates within interviews. Researchers rely on participation, yet interviewees control openness and can undermine data collection. Assumptions should be avoided.
  • Interviews on sensitive topics may feel like quasi-counseling. Interviewers must refrain from dual roles, instead supplying support service details to all participants.
  • Interviewees recruited for trauma experiences may reveal more than anticipated. While generating analytic insights, this risks leaving them feeling exposed.
  • Ultimately, power balances resist reconciliation. But reflexively analyzing operations of power serves to qualify rather than nullify situtated qualitative accounts.

Some groups, like those with mental health issues, extreme views, or criminal backgrounds, risk being discredited – treated skeptically by researchers.

This creates tensions with qualitative approaches, often having an empathetic ethos seeking to center subjective perspectives. Analysis should balance openness to offered accounts with critically examining stakes and motivations behind them.

Potter, J., & Hepburn, A. (2005). Qualitative interviews in psychology: Problems and possibilities.  Qualitative research in Psychology ,  2 (4), 281-307.

Houtkoop-Steenstra, H. (2000). Interaction and the standardized survey interview: The living questionnaire . Cambridge University Press

Madill, A. (2011). Interaction in the semi-structured interview: A comparative analysis of the use of and response to indirect complaints. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 8 (4), 333–353.

Maryudi, A., & Fisher, M. (2020). The power in the interview: A practical guide for identifying the critical role of actor interests in environment research. Forest and Society, 4 (1), 142–150

O’Key, V., Hugh-Jones, S., & Madill, A. (2009). Recruiting and engaging with people in deprived locales: Interviewing families about their eating patterns. Social Psychological Review, 11 (20), 30–35.

Puchta, C., & Potter, J. (2004). Focus group practice . Sage.

Schaeffer, N. C. (1991). Conversation with a purpose— Or conversation? Interaction in the standardized interview. In P. P. Biemer, R. M. Groves, L. E. Lyberg, & N. A. Mathiowetz (Eds.), Measurement errors in surveys (pp. 367–391). Wiley.

Silverman, D. (1973). Interview talk: Bringing off a research instrument. Sociology, 7 (1), 31–48.

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Time is an important element of any research design, and here I want to introduce one of the most fundamental distinctions in research design nomenclature: cross-sectional versus longitudinal studies. A cross-sectional study is one that takes place at a single point in time. In effect, we are taking a ‘slice’ or cross-section of whatever it is we’re observing or measuring. A longitudinal study is one that takes place over time – we have at least two (and often more) waves of measurement in a longitudinal design.

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One of the benefits of doing an Independent Research Study is setting your own schedule.  BUT one of the most difficult things about doing an Independent Research Study is setting your own schedule.  Here are some guidelines to help you:

  • Your project must be completed within the 6-week course cycle in which you are enrolled.  Use the end date as your deadline for the final draft of your project. Plug your start date into the first day of your schedule.
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Structured Interview | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on January 27, 2022 by Tegan George and Julia Merkus. Revised on June 22, 2023.

A structured interview is a data collection method that relies on asking questions in a set order to collect data on a topic. It is one of four types of interviews .

In research, structured interviews are often quantitative in nature. They can also be used in qualitative research if the questions are open-ended, but this is less common.

While structured interviews are often associated with job interviews, they are also common in marketing, social science, survey methodology, and other research fields.

  • Semi-structured interviews : A few questions are predetermined, whereas the other questions aren’t planned.
  • Unstructured interviews : None of the questions are predetermined.
  • Focus group interviews : The questions are presented to a group instead of one individual.

Table of contents

What is a structured interview, when to use a structured interview, advantages of structured interviews, disadvantages of structured interviews, structured interview questions, how to conduct a structured interview, how to analyze a structured interview, presenting your results, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about structured interviews.

Structured interviews are the most systematized type of interview. In contrast to semi-structured or unstructured interviews, the interviewer uses predetermined questions in a set order.

Structured interviews are often closed-ended. They can be dichotomous, which means asking participants to answer “yes” or “no” to each question, or multiple-choice. While open-ended structured interviews do exist, they are less common.

Asking set questions in a set order allows you to easily compare responses between participants in a uniform context. This can help you see patterns and highlight areas for further research, and it can be a useful explanatory or exploratory research tool.

Structured interviews are best used when:

  • You already have a very clear understanding of your topic, so you possess a baseline for designing strong structured questions.
  • You are constrained in terms of time or resources and need to analyze your data efficiently.
  • Your research question depends on strong parity between participants, with environmental conditions held constant.

A structured interview is straightforward to conduct and analyze. Asking the same set of questions mitigates potential biases and leads to fewer ambiguities in analysis. It is an undertaking you can likely handle as an individual, provided you remain organized.

Differences between different types of interviews

Make sure to choose the type of interview that suits your research best. This table shows the most important differences between the four types.

Reduced bias

Increased credibility, reliability and validity, simple, cost-effective and efficient, formal in nature, limited flexibility, limited scope.

It can be difficult to write structured interview questions that approximate exactly what you are seeking to measure. Here are a few tips for writing questions that contribute to high internal validity :

  • Define exactly what you want to discover prior to drafting your questions. This will help you write questions that really zero in on participant responses.
  • Avoid jargon, compound sentences, and complicated constructions.
  • Be as clear and concise as possible, so that participants can answer your question immediately.
  • Do you think that employers should provide free gym memberships?
  • Did any of your previous employers provide free memberships?
  • Does your current employer provide a free membership?
  • a) 1 time; b) 2 times; c) 3 times; d) 4 or more times
  • Do you enjoy going to the gym?

Structured interviews are among the most straightforward research methods to conduct and analyze. Once you’ve determined that they’re the right fit for your research topic , you can proceed with the following steps.

Step 1: Set your goals and objectives

Start with brainstorming some guiding questions to help you conceptualize your research question, such as:

  • What are you trying to learn or achieve from a structured interview?
  • Why are you choosing a structured interview as opposed to a different type of interview, or another research method?

If you have satisfying reasoning for proceeding with a structured interview, you can move on to designing your questions.

Step 2: Design your questions

Pay special attention to the order and wording of your structured interview questions . Remember that in a structured interview they must remain the same. Stick to closed-ended or very simple open-ended questions.

Step 3: Assemble your participants

Depending on your topic, there are a few sampling methods you can use, such as:

  • Voluntary response sampling : For example, posting a flyer on campus and finding participants based on responses
  • Convenience sampling of those who are most readily accessible to you, such as fellow students at your university
  • Stratified sampling of a particular age, race, ethnicity, gender identity, or other characteristic of interest to you
  • Judgment sampling of a specific set of participants that you already know you want to include

Step 4: Decide on your medium

Determine whether you will be conducting your interviews in person or whether your interview will take pen-and-paper format. If conducted live, you need to decide if you prefer to talk with participants in person, over the phone, or via video conferencing.

Step 5: Conduct your interviews

As you conduct your interviews, be very careful that all conditions remain as constant as possible.

  • Ask your questions in the same order, and try to moderate your tone of voice and any responses to participants as much as you can.
  • Pay special attention to your body language (e.g., nodding, raising eyebrows), as this can bias responses.

After you’re finished conducting your interviews, it’s time to analyze your results.

  • Assign each of your participants a number or pseudonym for organizational purposes.
  • Transcribe the recordings manually or with the help of transcription software.
  • Conduct a content or thematic analysis to look for categories or patterns of responses. In most cases, it’s also possible to conduct a statistical analysis to test your hypotheses .

Transcribing interviews

If you have audio-recorded your interviews, you will likely have to transcribe them prior to conducting your analysis. In some cases, your supervisor might ask you to add the transcriptions in the appendix of your paper.

First, you will have to decide whether to conduct verbatim transcription or intelligent verbatim transcription. Do pauses, laughter, or filler words like “umm” or “like” affect your analysis and research conclusions?

  • If so, conduct verbatim transcription and include them.
  • If not, conduct intelligent verbatim transcription, which excludes fillers and fixes any grammar issues, and is often easier to analyze.

The transcription process is a great opportunity for you to cleanse your data as well, spotting and resolving any inconsistencies or errors that come up as you listen.

Coding and analyzing structured interviews

After transcribing, it’s time to conduct your thematic or content analysis . This often involves “coding” words, patterns, or themes, separating them into categories for more robust analysis.

Due to the closed-ended nature of many structured interviews, you will most likely be conducting content analysis, rather than thematic analysis.

  • You quantify the categories you chose in the coding stage by counting the occurrence of the words, phrases, subjects or concepts you selected.
  • After coding, you can organize and summarize the data using descriptive statistics .
  • Next, inferential statistics allows you to come to conclusions about your hypotheses and make predictions for future research. 

When conducting content analysis, you can take an inductive or a deductive approach. With an inductive approach, you allow the data to determine your themes. A deductive approach is the opposite, and involves investigating whether your data confirm preconceived themes or ideas.

Content analysis has a systematic procedure that can easily be replicated , yielding high reliability to your results. However, keep in mind that while this approach reduces bias, it doesn’t eliminate it. Be vigilant about remaining objective here, even if your analysis does not confirm your hypotheses .

After your data analysis, the next step is to combine your findings into a research paper .

  • Your methodology section describes how you collected the data (in this case, describing your structured interview process) and explains how you justify or conceptualize your analysis.
  • Your discussion and results sections usually address each of your coded categories, describing each in turn, as well as how often they occurred.

If you conducted inferential statistics in addition to descriptive statistics, you would generally report the test statistic , p -value , and effect size in your results section. These values explain whether your results justify rejecting your null hypothesis and whether the result is practically significant .

You can then conclude with the main takeaways and avenues for further research.

Example of interview methodology for a research paper

Let’s say you are interested in healthcare on your campus. You attend a large public institution with a lot of international students, and you think there may be a difference in perceptions based on country of origin.

Specifically, you hypothesize that students coming from countries with single-payer or socialized healthcare will find US options less satisfying.

There is a large body of research available on this topic, so you decide to conduct structured interviews of your peers to see if there’s a difference between international students and local students.

You are a member of a large campus club that brings together international students and local students, and you send a message to the club to ask for volunteers.

Here are some questions you could ask:

  • Do you find healthcare options on campus to be: excellent; good; fair; average; poor?
  • Does your home country have socialized healthcare? Yes/No
  • Are you on the campus healthcare plan? Yes/No
  • Have you ever worried about your health insurance? Yes/No
  • Have you ever had a serious health condition that insurance did not cover? Yes/No
  • Have you ever been surprised or shocked by a medical bill? Yes/No

After conducting your interviews and transcribing your data, you can then conduct content analysis, coding responses into different categories. Since you began your research with the theory that international students may find US healthcare lacking, you would use the deductive approach to see if your hypotheses seem to hold true.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

  • Student’s  t -distribution
  • Normal distribution
  • Null and Alternative Hypotheses
  • Chi square tests
  • Confidence interval
  • Quartiles & Quantiles
  • Cluster sampling
  • Stratified sampling
  • Data cleansing
  • Reproducibility vs Replicability
  • Peer review
  • Prospective cohort study

Research bias

  • Implicit bias
  • Cognitive bias
  • Placebo effect
  • Hawthorne effect
  • Hindsight bias
  • Affect heuristic
  • Social desirability bias

A structured interview is a data collection method that relies on asking questions in a set order to collect data on a topic. They are often quantitative in nature. Structured interviews are best used when: 

  • You already have a very clear understanding of your topic. Perhaps significant research has already been conducted, or you have done some prior research yourself, but you already possess a baseline for designing strong structured questions.
  • You are constrained in terms of time or resources and need to analyze your data quickly and efficiently.

More flexible interview options include semi-structured interviews , unstructured interviews , and focus groups .

The four most common types of interviews are:

  • Structured interviews : The questions are predetermined in both topic and order. 
  • Semi-structured interviews : A few questions are predetermined, but other questions aren’t planned.

The interviewer effect is a type of bias that emerges when a characteristic of an interviewer (race, age, gender identity, etc.) influences the responses given by the interviewee.

There is a risk of an interviewer effect in all types of interviews , but it can be mitigated by writing really high-quality interview questions.

Cite this Scribbr article

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Pakistan ex-PM Imran Khan aide says party aims to form government

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  • International

February 3, 2024 Israel-Hamas war

By Chris Lau, Nadeen Ebrahim, Andrew Raine , Adrienne Vogt , Matt Meyer and Tori B. Powell , CNN

Our live coverage of Israel's war on Hamas in Gaza has moved here.

US strikes anti-ship cruise missile in Yemen

From CNN's Jalen Beckford 

US forces struck an additional Houthi anti-ship cruise missile in Yemen early Sunday local time, according to US Central Command.

The strike was conducted in "self defense" against a Houthi cruise missile "prepared to launch against ships in the Red Sea" at 4 a.m. local time on Sunday, US Central Command said in a statement. 

US forces determined the cruise missile presented an "imminent threat" to US Navy ships and other vessels in the region.

The strike is a part of the US military's effort to deter the Houthis from further disrupting the global shipping lanes in the Red Sea. 

Israel says it has hit multiple Hezbollah targets in Syria and Lebanon since Gaza war began

From CNN's Michael Rios, Lauren Izso and Charbel Mallo

Israel’s military has attacked more than 3,400 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and more than 50 in Syria since the war in Gaza broke out 120 days ago, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari said.

At a press briefing Saturday, Hagari said Israel has been trying to stop Hezbollah's “supply chain of ammunition and missiles,” which he alleged were being smuggled from Iran to Syria and then to Lebanon.

Hagari also said the Israeli military has deployed three divisions along the Lebanese border since October 7 -- instead of the usual single division to try to thwart Hezbollah's capabilities and protect people in northern Israel.

For the last four months, along with the war in Gaza, we have been waging a very intense battle on the northern front, aimed at reshaping the security reality so that the residents of the north can return to their homes safely,” Hagari said, adding: "So far we have attacked more than 150 terrorist units and eliminated more than 200 terrorists and commanders."

Hezbollah on Saturday said it had launched at least eight attacks on Israeli positions.

The IDF acknowledged that “a number of launches” were identified crossing from Lebanon to northern Israel, but said no injuries were reported and that it struck the sources of the fire.

UK says strikes on Houthis in Yemen are about protecting innocent lives

From CNN’s Jomana Karadsheh and Morayo Ogunbayo

In this image provided by the UK Ministry of Defense, RAF Typhoon FRG4s are prepared to conduct strikes against Houthi military targets in Yemen on Saturday.

UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said Saturday that strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen are about protection.

“The Houthis’ attacks on commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea are illegal and unacceptable and it is our duty to protect innocent lives and preserve freedom of navigation,” Shapps said in a statement after the United Kingdom and United States conducted the strikes against the Iranian-backed rebel group.

Shapps also said   the strikes were "not an escalation," adding that they have "already successfully targeted launchers and storage sites involved in Houthi attacks" on ships in the Red Sea.

In a separate   joint statement with the US-led coalition, the UK said that Houthi attacks constituted “an international challenge” and issued a warning to Houthi leadership. 

“We will not hesitate to continue to defend lives and the free flow of commerce in one of the world's most critical waterways in the face of continued threats,” the coalition said. 

The Houthi rebels have said their strikes on Red Sea ships are in response to Israel's military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

"We will meet escalation with escalation," Houthi senior official says in response to strikes in Yemen

From CNN's Eyad Kourdi

Mohammed Al Bukhaiti, a top member of the Houthi Political Council, said the group will continue its military operations until the siege on Gaza is lifted and vowed to respond to the latest US and UK strikes in Yemen.

In the group's first reaction to the latest wave of attacks, he warned: "We will meet escalation with escalation."

Al Bukhaiti wrote on X:

"The US-British coalition’s bombing of a number of Yemeni provinces will not change our position, and we affirm that our military operations against Israel will continue until the crimes of genocide in Gaza are stopped and the siege on its residents is lifted, no matter the sacrifices it costs us."    "Our war is moral, and if we had not intervened to support the oppressed in Gaza, humanity would not have existed among humans. The American-British aggression against Yemen will not go unanswered, and we will meet escalation with escalation," he said.

US strikes make it difficult to reach a political solution in the region, Iran tells UN

From CNN's Artemis Mostaghian, Jennifer Z. Deaton, and Hande Atay Alam

Recent strikes by the US military in the Middle East make it difficult to reach a political solution in the region, Iran's foreign minister told the United Nations' special envoy for Yemen on Saturday, according to Iran's state-run news agency.

Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian made the comments prior to US officials confirming the latest strikes Saturday on Houthi targets. The attacks follow multiple joint US-UK airstrikes on the Iran-backed rebel group in Yemen last month.

During their meeting in Tehran, Amir-Abdollahian told Special Envoy Hans Grundberg that the US strikes and its decision to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization have "complicated the situation and made it more difficult to reach a political solution," the state news agency, IRNA, reported. 

Amir-Abdollahian also called US strikes "the continuation of Washington’s wrong and failed approach to resolve issues by force and through militarism," IRNA reported. 

Remember: The US also conducted major airstrikes on 85 targets across seven locations in Iraq and Syria on Friday in response to a drone strike in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. 

The strikes in Yemen are distinct from the attacks in Iraq and Syria: The former is a response to ongoing Houthi attacks on international shipping and US warships in the Red Sea, while the latter is a retaliation for the deadly attack on US troops. But both target Iranian-backed groups in the Middle East.

Biden approved Saturday strikes earlier this week, officials say

From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez

A US-led coalition conducts airstrikes in Yemen on Saturday.

US President Joe Biden gave the green light for Saturday's strikes earlier in the week, according to two senior administration officials. 

The strikes are separate from the retaliatory measures the United States took on Friday in Syria and Iraq, and are related to ongoing actions to defend US ships and international commercial vessels in the Red Sea, according to one administration official.

They mark the third set of strikes as part of a coalition that includes the United States, the UK, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark and New Zealand. 

The senior administration official stressed that the US does not want escalation, and that the strikes are in direct response to the actions by the Iranian-backed Houthis.

The strikes occurred as Biden visited his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. The president is currently en route to Los Angeles, where he's expected to participate in campaign fundraisers. 

What to know about the Houthis

From CNN's Christian Edwards

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels say their strikes on ships in the  Red Sea as in response to Israel's military campaign in Gaza. There are fears that the attacks could escalate Israel’s war against Hamas into a wider regional conflict.

On Saturday, the US and UK struck over 30 Houthi targets across Yemen, while the US also struck six Houthi anti-ship cruise missiles that the group was prepared to launch against ships in the Red Sea, according to US officials.

This is what you should know about the rebel group:

Civil war: The Houthi movement, also known as Ansarallah (Supporters of God), is one side of the Yemeni civil war that has raged for nearly a decade. Yemen’s civil war began in 2014, when Houthi forces stormed the capital Sanaa and toppled the internationally recognized and Saudi-backed government, triggering a civil war. The war has sparked one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and pushing parts of the country into famine.

Backed by Iran: The Houthis are backed by Iran, which began increasing its aid to the group in 2014 as the civil war escalated and as its rivalry with Saudi Arabia intensified. Iran has provided the group with weapons and technology for, among other things, sea mines, ballistic and cruise missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones), according to a 2021  report  from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Shipping attacks: While the Houthis may not be able to pose a serious threat to Israel, their technology can wreak havoc in the Red Sea. There are fears that the Houthi drone and missile attacks against commercial vessels, which have occurred  almost daily since December 9 , could cause an even greater shock to the world economy. The Houthi strikes could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of Gaza. Championing the Palestinian cause could also be an attempt to gain legitimacy at home and in the region as they seek to control northern Yemen. It could also give them an upper hand against their Arab adversaries, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who they accuse of being lackeys of the US and Israel.

US defense secretary says strikes send "clear message to the Houthis" to end attacks on shipping routes

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks during a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on February 1.

The additional strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen send a clear message to the Iran-backed militia, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday.

Austin issued the following statement:

"These strikes are intended to further disrupt and degrade the capabilities of the Iranian-backed Houthi militia to conduct their reckless and destabilizing attacks against U.S. and international vessels lawfully transiting the Red Sea. Coalition forces targeted 13 locations associated with the Houthis' deeply buried weapons storage facilities, missile systems and launchers, air defense systems, and radars. "This collective action sends a clear message to the Houthis that they will continue to bear further consequences if they do not end their illegal attacks on international shipping and naval vessels."

Coalition statement: In a separate statement, the US, UK, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand said. 

"These precision strikes are intended to disrupt and degrade the capabilities that the Houthis use to threaten global trade, and the lives of innocent mariners, and are in response to a series of illegal, dangerous, and destabilizing Houthi actions since previous coalition strikes on January 11 and 22, 2024, including the January 27 attack which struck and set ablaze the Marshall Islands-flagged oil tanker M/V Marlin Luanda." It added: "Our aim remains to de-escalate tensions and restore stability in the Red Sea but let us reiterate our warning to Houthi leadership: we will not hesitate to continue to defend lives and the free flow of commerce in one of the world's most critical waterways in the face of continued threats."

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COMMENTS

  1. "Schedule" and "Questionnaire" in Research Methodology

    The use of a questionnaire and schedule in research projects is a long-standing practice, and the two share similarities. They both consist of sets of related items with questions relating to central problems. How the Sandwich Was Invented Joanne Hayle 0:00 / 0:00

  2. Schedule as a Data Collection Technique in Research

    Schedule is the tool or instrument used to collect data from the respondents while interview is conducted. Schedule contains questions, statements (on which opinions are elicited) and blank spaces/tables for filling up the respondents. The features of schedules are : The schedule is presented by the interviewer.

  3. How To Write a Research Plan (With Template and Examples)

    A research plan allows you to stay organized and oriented toward your goals. Learning more about how to write a research plan can help you improve your research tasks and get better results. In this article, we review what a research plan is, explain why it's important and explain how to write a research plan step by step. Related jobs on Indeed

  4. Difference Between Questionnaire and Schedule (with Comparison Chart

    The schedule is a proforma which contains a list of questions filled by the research workers or enumerators, specially appointed for the purpose of data collection. Enumerators go to the informants with the schedule, and ask them the questions from the set, in the sequence and record the replies in the space provided.

  5. Questionnaire and Schedule Method

    A questionnaire and schedule is considered the heart of a survey work. Hence, it should be carefully constructed. Questionnaires are a method used to collect standardized data from large numbers of people. They are used to collect data in a statistical form. If it is not properly constructed, the survey will become difficult.

  6. Schedule/work plan

    Schedule/work plan Though not always required, the schedule or work plan in a research proposal identifies the target dates for significant actions or stages in the proposed research.

  7. What is the Difference Between Questionnaire and Schedule

    A schedule is a research tool to gather information and design a research study. A schedule consists of a set of structured questions on a specific topic. The interviewer directly asks these questions personally. When the respondents face issues in understanding the questions in a schedule, they can seek help from the interviewer to sort them out.

  8. Q: Can you please guide me about the Research Plan Schedule?

    Planning and then scheduling your research involves breaking down your broader research actions into smaller tasks, estimating and allocating a certain amount of time to each, and then tracking the plan to see whether you are on target or not, and therefore, what changes you need to make.

  9. PDF Chapter 4 Types of Schedules

    Definition 4.9 An active schedule is a feasible schedule, where none of the activites j, 1 :5 j :5 J, can be locally or globally left shifted. Finally, in the JSP context (d. [5], p. 185), a non-delay schedule is a schedule where "no machine is kept idle at a time when it could begin processing some operation". ...

  10. Questionnaires and Schedules

    The schedule is a formalized set of questions, statements, and spaces for answers, provided to the enumerators who ask questions to the respondents and note down the answers. While a questionnaire is filled by the informants themselves, enumerators fill the schedule on behalf of the respondent. Character. Questionnaire.

  11. Research Methodology, Timeline, and Tools

    10. Physical Setting and Location. 11. Public Policy. Th e Center for Association Leadership partnered with a specialist in behavioral research who guided the development of both a process and a set of tools that included multiple data inputs, in multiple for-mats. We structured the process and the instruments together.

  12. (PDF) Focus on Methodology: Eliciting rich data: A ...

    An interview schedule was designed to provide structure and prompts for participants, ensuring rich, detailed information was captured (Bearman, 2019).

  13. Scheduling the scheduling task: a time-management ...

    4 Citations Explore all metrics Abstract The objective of this study was to characterize how schedulers spend their time interacting with external parties. Time is the most critical resource at the disposal of schedulers; however, its usage has been overlooked by prior empirical studies.

  14. Research Methods

    Research methods are specific procedures for collecting and analyzing data. Developing your research methods is an integral part of your research design. When planning your methods, there are two key decisions you will make. First, decide how you will collect data. Your methods depend on what type of data you need to answer your research question:

  15. Interview Method In Psychology Research

    A structured interview is a quantitative research method where the interviewer a set of prepared closed-ended questions in the form of an interview schedule, which he/she reads out exactly as worded. Interviews schedules have a standardized format, meaning the same questions are asked to each interviewee in the same order (see Fig. 1). Figure 1.

  16. Time in Research

    Time in Research. Time is an important element of any research design, and here I want to introduce one of the most fundamental distinctions in research design nomenclature: cross-sectional versus longitudinal studies. A cross-sectional study is one that takes place at a single point in time. In effect, we are taking a 'slice' or cross-section of whatever it is we're observing or measuring.

  17. Writing a Research Proposal: Structure and Time Schedule

    All the references you provide in stating the research problem and hypothesis should also be included in a separate section under the name "References" or "List of references". 11. Identify the Personnel. This part is used only in detailed research proposals and contains information about the main contributors to the area of your research.

  18. Schedule and Timeline

    Your conference dates will roughly divide your schedule into two phases: From the first conference to the second is the research phase. During this time, you will locate and read as many articles related to your topic as you can. Aim for 10 to 15 articles total. Try to map out specific reading and research goals on your schedule.

  19. (PDF) Work Schedules

    research, the Standard Shiftwork Index (and its shortened version) is proba- bly the most widely used battery of self-report measures for assessing shift work schedules (Barton et al., 1995 ...

  20. Types of Interviews in Research

    There are several types of interviews, often differentiated by their level of structure. Structured interviews have predetermined questions asked in a predetermined order. Unstructured interviews are more free-flowing. Semi-structured interviews fall in between. Interviews are commonly used in market research, social science, and ethnographic ...

  21. What is a Focus Group

    Published on December 10, 2021 by Tegan George . Revised on June 22, 2023. A focus group is a research method that brings together a small group of people to answer questions in a moderated setting. The group is chosen due to predefined demographic traits, and the questions are designed to shed light on a topic of interest.

  22. Research Schedule Definition

    Research Schedule means Schedule "A" attached hereto, any subsequent amendments thereto as mutually agreed by the Parties, which describes the Research Project, the Contract Fee, the Commencement Date, the required Completion Date of the Research Project, and any other specific requirements of the Research Project to be carried out under the Res...

  23. Structured Interview

    Structured Interview | Definition, Guide & Examples. Published on January 27, 2022 by Tegan George and Julia Merkus. Revised on June 22, 2023. A structured interview is a data collection method that relies on asking questions in a set order to collect data on a topic. It is one of four types of interviews.. In research, structured interviews are often quantitative in nature.

  24. Haley loses Republican Nevada primary to 'none of these candidates

    Haley, the last remaining rival to frontrunner Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, was the only major Republican candidate contesting the party's Nevada primary on Tuesday.

  25. February 3, 2024 Israel-Hamas war

    US forces determined the cruise missile presented an "imminent threat" to US Navy ships and other vessels in the region. The strike is a part of the US military's effort to deter the Houthis from ...