Decision Support and Interviewer Compliance

When I was working on my dissertation, I got interested in a field of research known as decision support. They use technical systems to help people make decisions. These technical systems help to implement complex algorithms (i.e. complicated if... then decision rules) and may include real-time data analysis. One of the reasons I got interested in this area was because I was wondering about implementing complicated decision algorithms (e.g. highly tailored, including to incoming paradata) in the field.

One of the problems associated with decision support has to do with compliance. Fortunately, Kawamoto and colleagues did a nifty systematic review of the literature to see what factors were related to compliance in a clinical setting. These features might be useful in a survey setting as well. They are:
1. The decision support should be part of the workflow.
2. It should deliver recommendations not just information.
3. The support should be delivered at the time the decision is made.
4. It should be computerized.

I had a couple of experiments that delivered recommendations to interviewers where the interviewers failed to follow these recommendations. One hypothesis about these failures might be that I failed to deliver the recommendation following the four principles from Kawamoto et al.

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