Structured Survey Interviewing: Telephone and In-Person Surveys Behice Ece Ilhan Chihchien Chen

Outlines  Interviewer factor  Interviewing techniques  Theories and methods of telephone surveys  Does Conversational Interviewing Reduce Survey Measurement Error?  Future research directions

Interviewer Factor Who is an interviewer?  Role expectations  Attitude structure expectations  Probability expectations  Interviewer vs. researcher  Interviewer as gatekeeper  Interactive nature of interviews ( Cannell et al 1981) Why is interviewer a factor in survey research?  Response rates  The accuracy of reporting  Consistency or precision of measurement  Interviewer expectations

 Role of interviewer  To locate and enlist cooperation of selected respondents To train and motivate respondents To ask questions, record answers, and probe incomplete answers  Why are these skills particularly important for telephone surveys? Interviewer Factor

 Standardization: to control for the interviewer factor  What is standardized interviews? Standardize what?  Tailoring vs. standardization Which one? When?  Implementation mode  Socially desirable questions/ knowledge questions  Interviewer profile Five aspects of interviewer behavior that the researcher tries to standardize  Presenting the study  Asking questions  Probing  Recording the answers  Interpersonal relations Interviewer Factor

Interviewer Related Error  When do we have interviewer related error?  Interviewer related error vs. interviewer bias  How does each affect the quality of data?

Interviewer performance  Training  How do we rate interviewer performance? (telephone vs. face-to-face vs. mail surveys)  Why is it important? In Class Activity: As a researcher, pretend that you want to hire an interviewer to conduct your research. Explain him/her or the group about the expected roles and performances from the interviewers. Mention about standardization, probing, performance measures, tailoring etc.

Selecting Interviewers  The criteria to select In Class Activity: According to the literature, which of these criteria are independent of the type of the study? In other words, which of them don’t cause interaction between subject matter and the demographic characteristics of the respondents and the interviewers?  Age  Education  Part time / Full time  Experience  Race  Religion  Ethnicity

In Class Activity: Role Playing Presenting a study: Pretend that you are an interviewer. By the researcher, you are assigned to call people about a study about counterfeiting products survey. How will you present the study? Let’s write a script together. The Study seeks to identify differences in consumers’ attitudes toward counterfeited products in fashion, medicine, food etc. (across race, gender, education, and age) Possible informants are elderly, professionals, young people, housewives etc. Try to tailor the presentation for different profiles of informants. What type of informant do you think will be more challenging? Support your answers with data from literature. (e.g. difficult to engage old people)

Presenting the Study In class activity:

Interviewing Techniques  Historical perspectives  Current perspectives Question answering process – (diagram in cognitive processes)  Cognitive and motivational difficulties in answering questions  demands placed on informants Deviation from process due to some situational cues (or sometimes due to personal traits) such as social desirability bias, acquiescence bias,etc.  Response Errors Underreporting /Overreporting: due to elapsed time, salience of events, perceptions of social desirability (e.g. hospitalization) Standard Interviewing Techniques:

Interviewing Techniques  Improving interviewing techniques Question length  What are some findings about question length?  How do you interpret these findings? Response Modeling Introduction Reinforcement and Feedback Commitment Pace Rapport  Experiments with the new techniques of commitment, instructions, and feecdback

Theories & Methods of Telephone Surveys (Groves, 1990) What is the goal of survey theory? What are the factors affecting the quality of response? Three kinds of sampling frames: Telephone directories Computerized files based on directories Area code-prefix frames

Theories & Methods of Telephone Surveys (Groves, 1990) How can social exchange theory be adapted to explain nonresponse error? How can communication theory be adapted to explain nonresponse error? Why do people accept or reject a survey request? What are the factors affecting the nonresponse rate?

Theories & Methods of Telephone Surveys (Groves, 1990) How is communication theory adapted to explain measurement error? Methods of decreasing the measurement error:

Does Conversational Interviewing Reduce Survey Measurement Error? (Schober & Conrad, 1997) Do we need a standardized procedure? What are the pros and cons of a standardized survey?

Does Conversational Interviewing Reduce Survey Measurement Error? (Schober & Conrad, 1997) Alternatives for implementing flexible interviewing: Type of interaction (un)scripted definition Why or why not use flexible interviewing? Does a flexible interviewing initiate other effects? When to adopt a flexible interviewing? It is not a panacea.

Does Conversational Interviewing Reduce Survey Measurement Error? (Schober & Conrad, 1997) If we want to measure social desirable questions, telescoping errors, closed- ended questions, and threatening and knowledge questions, can the flexible interviewing itself change respondents ’ answers? If so, how can that happen?

Theories & Methods of Telephone Surveys (Groves, 1990) CATI (computer-Assisted telephone interviewing)

Brainstorming Since nowadays many people only have cell phones as their primary phone contact, how does the fewer number of viable landlines affect the traditional telephone survey? What are the reasons causing survey errors in the situation? How would survey errors appear, and how can we reduce the survey errors? Would that change things?

Theories & Methods of Telephone Surveys (Groves, 1990)  How does social exchange theory be adopted to explain nonresponse error?  How does communication theory be adopted to explain nonresponse error?  Why do people accept or reject a survey request?

What to take home? Prof. Shavitt: [This is an interactive class activity, which aims to summarize 5 important points of what we have learned in the session.]