268 ■ Part Three
Most interview surveys require more than
one interviewer, although you might undertake
a small-scale interview survey yourself. Portions
of this section will discuss methods for training
and supervising a staff of interviewers who are
assisting you with a survey.
This section deals specifically with survey
interviewing. Chapter 10 discusses the lessstructured,
in-depth interviews often conducted
in qualitative field research.
The Role of the Survey Interviewer
There are several advantages to having a questionnaire
administered by an interviewer rather
than a respondent. To begin with, interview
surveys typically attain higher response rates
than do mail surveys. A properly designed and
executed interview survey ought to achieve
a completion rate of at least 80 to 85 percent.
(Federally funded surveys often require one of
these response rates.) Respondents seem more
reluctant to turn down an interviewer standing
on their doorstep than to throw away a mailed
questionnaire.
The presence of an interviewer also generally
decreases the number of “don’t knows” and “no
answers.” If minimizing such responses is important
to the study, the interviewer can be instructed
to probe for answers (“If you had to pick
one of the answers, which do you think would
come closest to your feelings?”).
Interviewers can also serve as a guard against
questionnaire items that are confusing. If the
respondent clearly misunderstands the intent of
a question, the interviewer can clarify matters,
thereby obtaining relevant responses. (As we’ll
discuss shortly, such clarifications must be strictly
controlled through formal specifications.)
Finally, the interviewer can observe respondents
as well as ask questions. For example, the
interviewer can note the respondent’s gender
without having to ask. Similar observations can
be made regarding the quality of the dwelling,
the presence of various possessions, the respondent’s
ability to speak English, the respondent’s
general reactions to the study, and so forth.
In one survey of students, respondents were
given a short, self-administered questionnaire
to complete—concerning sexual attitudes and
behavior—during the course of the interview.
questionnaires had been stuffed into envelopes,
they were grouped by ZIP Code, tied in bundles,
and delivered to the post office.
Shortly after the initial mailing, questionnaires
and postcards began arriving at the
research office. Questionnaires were opened,
scanned, and assigned identification numbers,
as described earlier in this chapter. For every
postcard received, a search was made for that
student’s remaining labels, and they were
destroyed.
After 2 or 3 weeks, the remaining mailing
labels were used to organize a follow-up mailing.
This time a special, separate letter of appeal
was included in the mailing piece. The new letter
indicated that many students had returned their
questionnaires already, and it was very important
for all others to do so as well.
The follow-up mailing stimulated a resurgence
of returns, as expected, and the same logging
procedures were continued. The returned
postcards told us which additional mailing labels
to destroy. Unfortunately, time and financial
pressures made it impossible to undertake a third
mailing, as had been initially planned, but the
two mailings resulted in an overall return rate of
62 percent.
This illustration should give you a fairly
good sense of what’s involved in the execution
of mailed self-administered questionnaires. Let’s
turn now to the second principal method of conducting
surveys: in-person interviews.
Interview Surveys
The interview is an alternative method of collecting
survey data. Rather than asking respondents
to read questionnaires and enter their own
answers, researchers send interviewers to ask
the questions orally and to record respondents’
answers. Interviewing is typically done in a faceto-face
encounter, but telephone interviewing,
discussed in the next section, follows most of the
same guidelines.
interview A data-collection encounter in which
one person (an interviewer) asks questions of
another (a respondent). Interviews may be conducted
face to face or by telephone.
Copyright 2021 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Chapter 9: Survey Research ■ 269
General Guidelines for Survey
Interviewing
The manner in which interviews ought to be
conducted will vary somewhat by the survey
population and, to some degree, by the nature of
the survey content. Nevertheless, some general
guidelines apply to most interviewing situations.
Appearance and Demeanor
As a rule, interviewers should dress in a fashion
similar to that of the people they’ll be interviewing.
A richly dressed interviewer will probably
have difficulty getting good cooperation and
responses from poorer respondents; a poorly
dressed interviewer will have similar difficulties
with richer respondents. To the extent that
the interviewer’s dress and grooming differ from
those of the respondents, it should be in the
direction of cleanliness and neatness in modest
apparel. If cleanliness is not next to godliness,
it appears to at least be next to neutrality.
Although middle-class neatness and cleanliness
may not be accepted by all sectors of U.S. society,
they remain the primary norm and are the most
likely to be acceptable to the largest number of
respondents.
Dress and grooming are typically regarded
as signs of a person’s attitudes and orientations.
At the time this is being written, torn
jeans, green hair, and razor-blade earrings may
communicate—correctly or incorrectly—that the
interviewer is politically radical, sexually permissive,
in favor of drug use, and so forth. Any of
these impressions could bias responses or affect
the willingness of people to be interviewed.
In demeanor, interviewers should be pleasant
if nothing else. Because they’ll be prying into
a respondent’s personal life and attitudes, they
must communicate a genuine interest in getting
to know the respondent without appearing to
pry. They must be relaxed and friendly without
being too casual or clingy. Good interviewers
also have the ability to determine very quickly
the kind of person the respondent will feel most
comfortable with, the kind of person the respondent
would most enjoy talking to. Clearly, the interview
will be more successful if the interviewer
can become the kind of person the respondent is
comfortable with. Further, because respondents
are asked to volunteer a portion of their time and
While a student completed the questionnaire,
the interviewer made detailed notes regarding
the dress and grooming of the respondent.
This procedure raises an ethical issue. Some
researchers have objected that such practices
violate the spirit of the agreement by which the
respondent has allowed the interview. Although
ethical issues are seldom clear-cut in social research,
it’s important to be sensitive to them
(see Chapter 3).
Survey research is of necessity based on an
unrealistic stimulus–response theory of cognition
and behavior. Researchers must assume that a
questionnaire item will mean the same thing to
every respondent, and every given response will
mean the same thing when given by different
respondents. Although this is an impossible goal,
survey questions are drafted to achieve the ideal
as closely as possible.
The interviewer must also fit into this ideal
situation. The interviewer’s presence should not
affect a respondent’s perception of a question
or the answer given. In other words, the interviewer
should be a neutral medium through
which questions and answers are transmitted.
As such, different interviewers should obtain
exactly the same responses from a given respondent.
(Recall our earlier discussions of reliability.)
This neutrality has a special importance in
area samples. To save time and money, a given
interviewer is typically assigned to complete all
the interviews in a particular geographic area—a
city block or a group of nearby blocks. If the interviewer
does anything to affect the responses
obtained, the bias thus interjected might be interpreted
as a characteristic of that area.
Let’s suppose that a survey is being done to
determine attitudes toward low-cost housing
in order to help in the selection of a site for a
new government-sponsored development. An
interviewer assigned to a given neighborhood
might—through word or gesture—communicate
his or her own distaste for low-cost housing developments.
Respondents might therefore tend
to give responses in general agreement with the
interviewer’s own position. The results of the
survey would indicate that the neighborhood
in question strongly resists construction of the
development in their area when in fact their apparent
resistance simply reflects the interviewer’s
attitudes.
Copyright 2021 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
270 ■ Part Three
While I hope the logic of this injunction is
clear, it’s not necessarily a closed discussion. For
example, Giampietro Gobo (2006) argues that
we might consider giving interviewers more
latitude, especially when respondents make
errors that are apparent to the interviewer on
the spot. Allowing the interviewer to intervene,
as he notes, does increase the possibility that the
interviewer’s understanding and opinions may
influence the data collected.
Recording Responses Exactly
Whenever the questionnaire contains openended
questions, which solicit the respondent’s
own answer, the interviewer must record that
answer exactly as given. No attempt should be
made to summarize, paraphrase, or correct bad
grammar.
This exactness is especially important because
the interviewer will not know how the responses
are to be coded. Indeed, the researchers themselves
may not know the coding until they’ve
read a hundred or so responses. For example,
the questionnaire might ask respondents how
they feel about the traffic situation in their community.
One respondent might answer that there
are too many cars on the roads and that something
should be done to limit their numbers.
Another might say that more roads are needed.
If the interviewer recorded these two responses
with the same summary—“congested traffic”—
the researchers would not be able to take advantage
of the important differences in the original
responses.
Sometimes, verbal responses are too inarticulate
or ambiguous to permit interpretation. However,
the interviewer may be able to understand
the intent of the response through the respondent’s
gestures or tone. In such a situation, the
interviewer should still record the exact verbal
response but should also add marginal comments
giving both the interpretation and the reasons for
arriving at it.
More generally, researchers can use any
marginal comments explaining aspects of the
response not conveyed in the verbal recording,
such as the respondent’s apparent anger, embarrassment,
uncertainty in answering, and so forth.
In each case, however, the exact verbal response
should also be recorded.
to divulge personal information, they deserve the
most enjoyable experience the researcher and
interviewer can provide.
Familiarity with the Questionnaire
If an interviewer is unfamiliar with the questionnaire,
the study suffers and the respondent bears an
unfair burden. The interview is likely to take more
time than necessary and be unpleasant. Moreover,
the interviewer cannot acquire familiarity by skimming
through the questionnaire two or three times.
He or she must study it carefully, question by question,
and must practice reading it aloud.
Ultimately, the interviewer must be able to
read the questionnaire items to respondents
without error and without stumbling over words
and phrases. A good model is the actor reading
lines in a play or movie. The lines must be read
as though they constituted a natural conversation,
but that conversation must follow exactly
the language set down in the questionnaire.
By the same token, the interviewer must be
familiar with the specifications prepared in conjunction
with the questionnaire. Inevitably some
questions will not exactly fit a given respondent’s
situation, and the interviewer must determine
how the question should be interpreted in that
situation. The specifications provided to the interviewer
should give adequate guidance in such
cases, but the interviewer must know the organization
and contents of the specifications well
enough to refer to them efficiently. It would be
better for the interviewer to leave a given question
unanswered than to spend 5 minutes searching
through the specifications for clarification or
trying to interpret the relevant instructions.
Following Question Wording Exactly
The first part of this chapter discussed the significance
of question wording for the responses
obtained. A slight change in the wording of a
given question may lead a respondent to answer
“yes” rather than “no.” It follows that
interviewers must be instructed to follow the
wording of questions exactly. Otherwise, all the
effort that the developers have put into carefully
phrasing the questionnaire items to obtain
the information they need and to ensure that
respondents interpret items precisely as intended
will be wasted.
Copyright 2021 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Chapter 9: Survey Research ■ 271
Coordination and Control
Most interview surveys require the assistance
of several interviewers. In large-scale surveys,
interviewers are hired and paid for their work.
Student researchers might find themselves recruiting
friends to help them interview. Whenever
more than one interviewer is involved in
a survey, their efforts must be carefully controlled.
This control has two aspects: training
interviewers and supervising them after they
begin work.
The interviewers’ training session should
begin with the description of what the study is
all about. Even though the interviewers may be
involved only in the data-collection phase of the
project, it will be useful for them to understand
what will be done with the interviews they conduct
and what purpose will be served. Morale
and motivation are usually lower when interviewers
don’t know what’s going on.
The training on how to interview should
begin with a discussion of general guidelines
and procedures, such as those discussed earlier
in this section. Then the whole group should go
through the questionnaire together—question
by question. Don’t simply ask if anyone has any
questions about the first page of the questionnaire.
Read the first question aloud, explain the
purpose of the question, and then entertain any
questions or comments the interviewers may
have. Once all their questions and comments
have been handled, go on to the next question in
the questionnaire.
It’s always a good idea to prepare specifications
to accompany an interview questionnaire.
Specifications are explanatory and clarifying comments
about handling difficult or confusing situations
that may occur with regard to particular
questions in the questionnaire. When drafting
the questionnaire, try to think of all the problem
cases that might arise—the bizarre (or not
so bizarre) circumstances that might make a
Probing for Responses
Sometimes respondents in an interview will give
an inappropriate or incomplete answer. In such
cases, a probe, or request for an elaboration, can
be useful. For example, a closed-ended question
may present an attitudinal statement and ask the
respondent to strongly agree, agree somewhat,
disagree somewhat, or strongly disagree. The
respondent, however, may reply: “I think that’s
true.” The interviewer should follow this reply
with “Would you say you strongly agree or agree
somewhat?” If necessary, interviewers can explain
that they must check one or the other of the
categories provided. If the respondent adamantly
refuses to choose, the interviewer should write in
the exact response given by the respondent.
Probes are more frequently required in
eliciting responses to open-ended questions. For
example, in response to a question about traffic
conditions, the respondent might simply reply,
“Pretty bad.” The interviewer could obtain an
elaboration on this response through a variety
of probes. Sometimes the best probe is silence;
if the interviewer sits quietly with pencil poised,
the respondent will probably fill the pause with
additional comments. (Newspaper reporters use
this technique effectively.) Appropriate verbal
probes might be “How is that?” or “In what
ways?” Perhaps the most generally useful probe
is “Anything else?”
Often, interviewers need to probe for answers
that will be sufficiently informative for analytic
purposes. In every case, however, such probes
must be completely neutral; they must not in any
way affect the nature of the subsequent response.
Whenever you anticipate that a given question
may require probing for appropriate responses,
you should provide one or more useful probes
next to the question in the questionnaire. This
practice has two important advantages. First,
you’ll have more time to devise the best, most
neutral probes. Second, all interviewers will use
the same probes whenever they’re needed. Thus,
even if the probe isn’t perfectly neutral, all respondents
will be presented with the same stimulus.
This is the same logical guideline that we
discussed for question wording. Although a question
should not be loaded or biased, every respondent
must be presented with the same question,
even if it is biased.
probe A technique employed in interviewing to
solicit a more complete answer to a question. It
is a nondirective phrase or question used to encourage
a respondent to elaborate on an answer.
Examples include “Anything more?” and “How is
that?”
Copyright 2021 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.