Otto is planning to run a study to understand international students’ sources of social support during their university studies. Which of the following would be a potential advantage of using interviews for this study?

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

In evaluating the question about the advantages of using interviews to study international students' sources of social support, we should look at what each option implies about the method.
Option 1: 'The data produced can be easily generalised to all international students.' This is typically not true for interview studies, which usually involve smaller, non-random samples. Interviews yield rich, contextual data that are great for depth but often limit generalisability due to sampling and context-specific factors.
Option 2: 'They can provide a more detailed understanding of the experiences of international students.' This captures a key strength of interviews: they enable participants to express their experiences in their own words, allowing the researcher to explore nuances, complexities, and personal contexts that surveys or archival data might miss.
Option 3: 'They would be good for testing theories about the relationship between social support and mental health.' While interviews can contribute to theory development and preliminary testing by uncovering mechanisms or patterns, they are not typically the most efficient or robust design for hypothesis testing or establishing causal relationships. Such testing is usually better suited to quantitative methods or experimental designs, possibly complemented by surveys.
Option 4: 'All of the above.' Since option 1 is problematic due to generalisability concerns and option 3 overstates the suitability of interviews for theory testing without additional design, this combined statement would be inaccurate.
Taken together, the strongest and most accurate advantage described here is the depth and detail obtained from interviewing participants about their experiences, which aligns with option 2. The other options either overstate generalisability, mischaracterize the method’s primary strength, or claim a broadened capability that interviews alone do not reliably provide.

Otto is planning to run a study to understand international students’ sources of social support during their university studies. Which of the following would be a potential advantage of using interviews for this study?

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