What Do Interviewers Learn? An Examination of Interview Length and Interviewer Behaviors

• Activity Number: 615 - Using Para-Data to Analyze the Determinants and Impact of Interview Length
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 2, 2018 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Kristen Olson* and Jolene Smyth
• Companies: University of Nebraska - Lincoln and University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Keywords: paradata; interview length; data quality; interviewer-respondent interaction

Abstract

Interviewers systematically speed up as they conduct interviews (Olson and Peytchev 2007). Hypotheses for this increase in speed is that interviewers learn behaviors from previous interviews, changing their behaviors accordingly, or that they change behaviors in response to who the respondent is, including both respondent's fixed characteristics and their response propensity. Previous work has failed to completely explain this learning effect, even after accounting for a wide range of measures of each of these hypotheses. However, prior work has not examined how actual behaviors during an interview are related to interview length and whether different interview lengths can be explained by different types of interviewer or respondent behaviors. This paper uses data from two telephone surveys with extensive information on interviewer and respondent behaviors to explain the within-survey interviewer experience effect. Preliminary analyses suggest that indicators of interviewer efficiency such as stuttering while asking the question or having other disfluencies significantly (p< .0001) decrease over the course of the field period, with these effects concentrated in the early interviews.