Exit and Other Interviews
Definition:

Asking individuals to share their perceptions of their own attitudes and/or behaviors or those of others. Evaluating student reports of their attitudes and/or behaviors in a face-to-face dialogue.

Advantages

Student interviews tend to have most of the attributes of surveys and questionnaires with the exception of requiring direct contact, which may limit accessibility to certain populations. Exit interviews provide the following advantages:
Allow for more individualized questions and follow-up probes based on the responses of interviewees.
Provide immediate feedback to interviewer.
Include same observational and formative advantages as oral examinations.
Frequently yield benefits beyond data collection that comes from opportunities to interact with students and other groups.
Can include a greater variety of items than is possible on surveys and questionnaires, including those that provide more direct measures of learning and development.

When third parties are making the reports there are additional advantages, as follows:

Can provide unique stakeholder input, valuable in its own right (especially employers and parents). How is the college/program/project/course serving the purposes of the stakeholder group?
Offer different perspectives, presumably less biased than either student or the assessor.
Enable recognition and contact with important, often under-valued constituents. Relations may improve by just asking for their input.
Can increase both internal validity and external validity.

Disadvantages

Requires direct contact, which may be difficult to arrange.
May be intimidating to interviewees, thus biasing results in the positive direction.
Results tend to be highly dependent on working of items and the manner in which interviews are conducted.
Time consuming, especially if large numbers of persons are to be interviewed.

Third party report disadvantages:

As with an indirect data, inference and reports risk high degree of error.
Third parties can be biased too, in directions more difficult to anticipate than self-reports.
Usually requires logistical details (e.g., identifying sample, making contact, getting useful responses, etc.,), therefore more costly than it looks.
If information about specific individuals is requested, confidentiality becomes an important and sometimes problematic issue that must be addressed carefully.

Ways to Reduce Disadvantages

Plan the interviews carefully with assistance from experts.
Provide training sessions for interviewers that include guidance in putting interviewees at ease and related interview skills.
Interview purposeful samples of students when it is not feasible to interview all.
Conduct telephone interviews when face-to-face contact is not feasible.
Develop an interview format and questions with a set time limit in mind.
Conduct pilot testing of interview and request feedback from interviewee to improve the interview process.
Utilize focus groups when individual interviewing is not possible or is too costly.

Ways to Reduce Third Party Disadvantages

Conduct face-to-face or phone interviews wherever possible, increasing validity through probing during dialogue.
Very careful, explicit directions for types and perspectives or responses requested can reduce variability.
Attain informed consent in cases where information about individuals is being requested.
Coordinate contacts with other campus organizations contacting the same groups to reduce harassment syndrome and increase response rtes.

Bottom Line:

Interviews provide opportunities to cover a broad range of content and to interact with respondents. Opportunities to follow-up response can be very valuable. Direct contact may be difficult to arrange, costly, and potentially threatening to respondents unless carefully planned.

Bibliographic Reference

Conducting Effective Interviews: How to Find Out What You Need to Know and Achieve the Right Results,

Improving Interview Method and Questionnaire Design,