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Interviewer Variability

In face-to-face surveys, interviewers play a very important role. They largely determine when they work, at which times they call cases, and how to address the concerns of sampled persons. Several studies have looked at the variability that interviewers have in achieving contact and cooperation. Durrant and Steele (2009) provide a particularly good example of this.

It is also the case that interviewers have only a partial view of the data being collected. They cannot detect imbalances that may occur at higher levels of aggregation.

For these reasons, it seems like controlling this variability is a useful goal. This may be done through improved training (as suggested by Groves and McGonagle, 2001), or by providing specific recommendations for actions to interviewers.

We have had some success in this area. In NSFG Cycle 7, we ran a series of 16 experiments that asked interviewers to prioritize a set of specified cases over other cases in their workload. The results were positive in that in each experiment the cases that were prioritized received more calls than those that were not.

On the other hand, in a separate experiment, we asked interviewers to attempt contact with households at a specified time. In this randomized experiment, did not follow the recommendation.

It seems that the question of why some recommendation/requests will be followed, while others will not is an important one. If these methods are to be employed successfully, we need to know when and how they work.
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