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Children’s verbal, interactive and cognitive skills and implications for interviews

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Abstract

Child respondents challenge social scientists because their verbal, interactive, and cognitive skills are not just different from those of adults, but also vary among children. To develop adequate methods for interviewing children, we need to learn more about those skills in interview settings and their dependence on age. Based on 112 semi-structured interviews with children aged 5–11 years, we studied children’s verbal, cognitive, and interactive skills. Fifty-six children were each interviewed twice, once face to face and once via telephone. Through an innovative triangulation of qualitative and quantitative analyses, children’s skills and related gains and limitations of each interview mode were examined. The applicability of semi-structured interviews was evaluated with skills and respondent’s age in mind, and recommendations for conducting interviews are made.

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Notes

  1. Telephone interviews are often dismissed in qualitative research and also in researching children. Our results suggested that telephone interviews should not be discounted immediately: a number of arguments favour telephone interviews in general and with children in particular, at least in some circumstances (see Vogl 2013).

  2. On principle, for example, school grades or psychometric tests could be used as proxy variables and demonstrate variance or correlations. For the practical application of interviews, however, this would be of little help because we don’t normally select respondents according to their grades or test results.

  3. Results of the mode comparison can be found elsewhere (Vogl 2013)

  4. The downside is obviously, that interviewer effects cannot be controlled for. The findings are determine by the interviewing skills and might vary (slightly) with different interviewers.

  5. Instead of the day before yesterday.

  6. Age ranges for all stages represent only an average approximation.

  7. Ideas of what is socially desirable, however, is highly context dependent. In one occasion deviant behavior is downplayed in another overstated (Scott 1997).

  8. Milchschnitte is popular children’s snack consisting of a soft chocolate sponge cake filled with white cream. Nutella is a chocolate-flavored hazelnut spread.

  9. At the time, these were two football players in the German national team.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by Maximilian-Bickhoff-Universtitätsstiftung.

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  1. Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Ostenstraße 24, 85071 , Eichstaett, Germany

    Susanne Vogl

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Vogl, S. Children’s verbal, interactive and cognitive skills and implications for interviews. Qual Quant 49, 319–338 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-013-9988-0

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