Page 99 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 4. Methodology

lection bias that may influence the result of this book. To address this, the findings of

the questionnaire were considered together with the secondary data collected from me-
dia materials. The copies of the questionnaire surveys are presented at Appendices 1, 2
and 3.

4.4 Semi-structured interviews

4.4.1 Design of the interviews
According to Blakeslee and Fleischer (2007):

‘[i]nterviews are opportunities to explore with a participant, in an in-depth man-
ner, a situation, experience, or issue. Interviews provide information both about
the person being interviewed and from that person’s perspective. They provide

insight into the person’s thoughts, perceptions, feelings, motivations, responses,
and actions in relation to the issues or situations being explored in the research’
(Blakeslee and Fleischer, 2007, p.129).
Located somewhere between the extremes of completely standardised and com-
pletely unstandardised interviewing structures is the semi-standardised interview,

which is also called the semi-structured interview (Berg, 2001). This type of interview
involves the use of a number of predetermined questions or topics. These are typically
asked of each interviewee in a systematic and consistent order, but the interviewees are

allowed to digress and the interviewer is permitted to probe further beyond the answers
to their prepared and standardised questions (ibid).
Semi-structured interview was used to look into the research questions from the
media market’s perspective. It targeted at the staff from major web portals and social
networking websites in China, such as Sina, NetEase, Tencent and some major BBS/

forums, as well as those who had worked or were currently working in state-owned
media enterprises, and official media departments. Interviewees were practitioners who
worked as an editor, content operator, technician or manager in the media market. A

wide range of interviewees can provide sufficient information from different aspects in
the domain and by comparing commercial and state-owned media enterprises, we can

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