615 – Using Para-Data to Analyze the Determinants and Impact of Interview Length
What Took You So Long? The Role of Experience as a Determinant of Interview Length
Kristina Altmann
Deutsche Bundesbank
Tobias Schmidt
Deutsche Bundesbank
The focus of this paper is on how the experience of interviewers and respondents influences interview duration. In contrast to existing studies we distinguish experience along several dimensions: 1) across waves of a panel study, 2) across interviews within one wave and 3) across different studies at the same survey institute. Our paper is one of the first to look at multiple measures of experience in a panel context. We analyse the time (per question) it takes respondents in the German Wealth Survey "Panel on Household Finances - PHF" to complete interviews. The survey is an interviewer mediated CAPI interview, which consists of a household interview and a personal interview of every household member at least 16 year old. In 2014, 4,461 households took part in the survey and about half of the survey sample is a panel interviewed for the second time. In our study we find similar patterns to those typically observed in the literature with respect to within study and general interviewer experience. A novel finding is that panel respondents tend to have longer per item interview duration than respondents interviewed for the first time. We do not find clear evidence that across waves panel interviewers tend to have different interview durations per item compared to other interviewers.