Interviews as a valid empirical tool in economics

doi:10.1016/S1053-5357(02)00176-2

The Journal of Socio-Economics

Volume 31, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 343-353

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-5357(02)00176-2 Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper contains a description of sampling, interviewing, and data analysis methods for surveys of business people and other business decision makers. I stress an informal interviewing style and sampling through networking. I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and objections to any form of interviewing.

Section snippets

Sampling

Many people are willing to discuss their economic affairs only if promised strict confidentiality. It is wise to go further and indicate that you will respect their privacy and not ask about confidential, proprietary, or competitive information. You could go still further and promise to structure interviews so formally that respondents would not be likely to reveal secrets inadvertently. People’s reluctance to cooperate is also reduced by using the name of a trusted third party when approaching

Interviewing

The appropriate style of interviewing depends to some extent on the goal of the study. If the objective is to test given theories, you should be sure to cover the questions relevant to those theories. If the objective is to understand the shape of a general phenomenon with a view to formulating new theories, then the style should be less structured in the hopes that the respondent will come up with unexpected descriptions and arguments.

In either case, it is important to allow informants a great

Interpretation

Extensive interviewing creates tall piles of typed notes or transcripts. I have found that the best way to organize these data is to form two kinds of documents, one a set of spread sheets and the other lists of quotations. There is one spread sheet for each issue or question discussed. On the spread sheets, rows correspond to informants and columns correspond to types of view on the issue or to types of answer to the question. The columns are labeled with a code, which is explained at the

Limitations

The method discussed is useful only if the views and practices of each category of people studied do not vary widely and if it is not important to quantify the variation that exists. Nor is the method likely to be useful if the matters discussed are so confidential that few informants would respond honestly. A drawback of the method is that it is expensive, time consuming, and physically demanding, because of the need to travel. The method makes the most sense when applied to people dealing

Answers to criticisms of the method

The best known criticism of the interview method is probably that of Machlup (1946), who argued that people do not know their own motives, so that what they say about them should not be taken seriously. The danger of this position is that investigators put too much power in their own hands by assuming they know better than decision makers what their motives are. Why should an investigator’s prejudices take precedence over those of the people studied? If you give yourself the right to ignore

Conclusion

I do not mean to imply that government economic statistics are not important to understanding economics. They are vital, as are the results of the various private statistical surveys. These should not, however, be thought of as the sole sources of information about economics. I propose a kind of main street economics that provides information supplementing the standard statistical sources. Main street economics should allow economists independently to examine economic life from close up. Since

References (9)

Bewley, T.F, 1999. Why Wages do not Fall During a Recession. Harvard University Press, Cambridge,...
Blinder, A.S., Canetti, E.R.D., Lebow, D.E., Rudd, J.B., 1998. Asking About Prices: A New Approach to Understanding...
Friedman, M., 1953. The Methodology of Positive Economics. Part I. Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago University...
R.E. Lucas et al.
Real wages, employment, and inflation
Journal of Political Economy
(1969)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (39)

The notion of validity in experimental crowd dynamics
2023, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
As experimental methods become increasingly popular in crowd dynamics, the question of experimental validity becomes more critical than ever. In fact, there will be no question more fundamental than what makes a crowd experiment valid. For the purposes of design, evaluation and interpretation of crowd experiments, it is paramount that we distinguish between different dimensions of their validity. Here, I differentiate between four categories of experimentation in crowd dynamics based on their underlying purpose of investigation. This includes experiments whose main aim is (i) testing a behavioural theory/hypothesis, (ii) exploring empirical behavioural regularities; (iii) assessing collective (system-level) performance rather than individual behaviour (iv) calibrating and/or validating pre-existing models (including partial/local or full/global model calibration). While delineating various dimensions of external and internal validity as they relate to crowd experiments and enumerating factors that could compromise their validity, I argue how the importance of different validity dimensions varies depending on the investigation's purpose (i.e., the category of experiment). This could provide clarity about circumstances where artificiality/simplicity of laboratory settings is justified as opposed to experiments for which higher levels of contextual fidelity/realism and ecological validity should be given a higher priority. It is critical that investigators (a) be conscious of the trade-off between controllability and realism in their experiment design and (b) identify potential factors that can jeopardise validity of their experiments and take measures to mitigate such threats. Furthermore, it is argued that inferences made from field data do not inherently supersede those of experiments on the issue of validity. Depending on the purpose of investigation, maintaining internal validity sometimes necessitates laboratory settings and justifies artificiality. Naturality of observations per se does not guarantee validity. In the absence of adequate control over the causal relationship, the question of external validity will be futile, as there will be no internally valid inference to be generalised in the first place. Therefore, striking a reasonable balance between internal and external validity of crowd experiments should be made a major design consideration. Overall, the matter of validity is more complicated than the mere creation of a realistic context in the experiment. Studies should not be dismissed merely on the account of ecological validity (contextual realism). The purpose of the design (category of experiment) should be taken into account in making that determination, although the compromise of contextual realism should always be kept to a minimum, and unnecessary compromise should be avoided.
Do geographical appellations provide useful quality signals? The case of Scotch single malt whiskies
2023, Economic Modelling
Collective reputation signals, such as geographical appellations or similar labels, aim to provide information concerning the quality of goods supplied by a group of producers and enable differentiation between groups. Several studies have shown that reputation can be disconnected from quality, raising doubts concerning the informational content of specific collective labels. Our study examines Scotch whisky geographical appellations as an unexplored case with collective label requirements that do not permit vertical differentiation. We use a dataset covering 83,494 sales records over nine years in the Scotch whisky second-hand market and run hedonic price analyses, finding evidence of a collective reputation effect, even after controlling for distillery individual reputation and bottle characteristics. These findings suggest that appellations can benefit from a reputation premium, despite low informational content. As a corollary, an appellation system can be profitable for certain producers without providing any helpful quality signals for consumers.
Fooling ourselves and others: confirmation bias and the trustworthiness of qualitative research – Part 2 (cross-examining the dismissals)
2021, Journal of Organizational Change Management
The purpose of this paper is to describe and critique ways in which the threats from confirmation bias have been rejected.
Dismissals of the existence of, or threats from, confirmation bias are identified from a review of literature across a very wide range of disciplines. The dismissals are robustly examined.
The dismissals are categorised as: (1) radical scepticism (2) consequentialism: and (3) denial. Each type of dismissal, it is argued, is flawed.
The three-fold structuring of confirmation bias dismissal is novel. In addition to drawing from organisation, management and wider social science literature, the article also uses arguments and examples from the creative arts.
Great expectations: Learning the boundaries of design rights
2019, Research Policy
Citation Excerpt :
It was possible to order all the court case material, including court evidence documents from physical court archives and review it by visiting the Helsinki district court and court of appeals. Since the beliefs, motives and decision-making processes of actors are not directly observable to the researcher, the only way to learn more about these is to ask decision-makers directly by conducting interviews (Bewley, 2002; Huber and Power, 1985). In essence, we are aiming to understand a process which means collecting “stories about what happened and who did what when” (Langley, 1999).
We present a case study of an increase in design right filings and concurrent design right litigations in an industry that previously had little experience of design right protection. The motives for and outcomes of filing, and how these changed over time are discussed. We go on to explore the events, which offered the decision makers opportunities to update their beliefs about the scope of design right protection. We find that filing motives changed from specific protection goals to freedom to operate over time. We also find that the actors faced several, but sometimes contradictory, learning opportunities. There are two types of learning relating to the usage of design rights: 1) learning the initial scope of protection and 2) learning the dynamism of scope that results from the growing number of designs in the product category. The evidence suggests that the scope of existing design rights is negatively affected by new design right grants. Our findings highlight the essential role of belief formation and updating in innovation activity and intellectual property rights-based competition. We conclude that uncertain design rights and information asymmetries may have fostered entrepreneurial optimism.
Triggers and barriers to energy efficiency measures in the ceramic, cement and lime sectors
2014, Journal of Cleaner Production
Citation Excerpt :
This also motivated the choice for a qualitative methodology analysing managers' perceptions. Bewley (2002) advocates the use of loosely structured interviews instead of questionnaires, particularly in areas where economic theory falls short of explaining observed behaviour. So an important part of the interview was based on semi-structured questions on organisational structure, risk, reliable information, capital availability, contracts with suppliers of technology, the effect of policy etc.
Evaluating and understanding the interplay of barriers to the diffusion of energy efficiency measures is highly relevant because, if policies are effective in overcoming these barriers, CO₂ emissions can be decreased at low cost. The study aims to understand how managers make decisions to invest in energy efficiency, how perceived barriers affect these decisions and how policy can overcome these barriers. We apply neo-classical economic theory as well as insights from transaction cost economics and behavioural economics to understand why hurdle rates, even when omitted costs and risk are taken into account, are higher than the weighted average cost of capital. We find that internal capital budgeting rules and the effort of studying technical feasibility and profitability are relevant to understanding the efficiency gap. The results indicate that the voluntary agreement and the emission trading scheme are complementary, addressing different barriers in different contexts.
Anatomy of a paradox: Management practices, organizational structure and energy efficiency
2012, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
Citation Excerpt :
Asking people about their motivations and behavior is a straightforward method of eliciting this information, but some precautions need to be taken to avoid that respondents give biased responses [18]. Bewley [19,20] advocates the use of loosely structured interviews instead of questionnaires, particularly in areas where the divergence between observed behavior and theoretical predictions suggests that people's objectives are not understood or that the constraints are misrepresented. Research on the energy efficiency paradox as described in the literature fits this description well.3
This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between management practices and firm performance. We interviewed managers of 190 randomly selected manufacturing plants in the UK and matched their responses with official business microdata. We find that climate friendly management practices are associated with lower energy intensity and higher productivity. Firms that adopt more such practices also conduct more climate friendly R&D which will sustain future growth in energy efficiency. Our findings are akin to the “energy efficiency paradox” and highlight the linkages between particular management practices and firm-level energy efficiency. We also find a strong empirical link between climate friendly management practices and organizational structure. Firms are more likely to adopt such practices if climate change issues are managed by the environmental or energy manager, and if this manager is close to the CEO. Adoption is less likely when the CEO is in charge of climate change issues.

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text