ADVANCED RESEARCH METHOD

Survey Research II

SOCI5013: Spring 2004

Interview Surveys • Rather than asking respondents to fill out

questionnaires themselves, interview surveys require interviewers conduct face-to-face interviews with interviewees and filled out the questionnaire based on the interviews.

• Interview surveys obtain much higher response rate than self-administered questionnaire survey.

Interview Surveys II

• Obtain more valid data by reducing “don’t know” or “no answer” responses.

• If questionnaires contain confusing questions, or interviewees misunderstand some questions, interviewers can clarify those issues on the spot.

Interviews• Interviewers can obtain information such as

race, quality of housing, interviewee’s English, and various possessions without asking interviewees.

• For some questions, however, interviewers better off leaving interviewees to complete their answers. Those questions are sexual attitude, orientation, activities, and behaviors.

Interviews II

• Be sensitive to ethic issues that may go beyond the contract between the interviewees and the interviewers.

• Ideally, researchers assume that a questionnaire item means the same thing to every respondent, and every given response means the same to the reviewer.

Interviews III

• The presence of interviewer should not affect a respondent’s perception of a question or the answer given.

• Interviewer should not do anything to affect the responses obtained.

• For example, the presence of an African American interviewer may persuade many Caucasian respondents to oppose many racism measures.

Survey Interview

• Dressing code: dress similar as the interviewees. If not sure what interviewees will be dressing like, use the most neutral form of “middle class neatness and cleanliness” to appeal to the largest number of respondents.

Survey Interview II

• Avoid revelation of strong personal attitudes or orientations such as torn jeans, green hairs, razor blade earrings, which may convey politically radical, sexually permissive, and favorable to drug use. Those in turn will affect people’s inclination to respond or their actual responses.

Interviewers

• Interviewers should be familiar with the questionnaires, be able to communicate clearly with the interviewees.

• Interviewers should record responses EXACTLY.

Interviewers II

• Probing for a clear response. An interviewee may give a presentation on a questionnaire item asking “what is the most important issue facing American today.”

• In the probing process, interviewers should remain completely neutral and not to affect interviewee’s responses.

Coordination and Control

• Researchers commonly hire interviewers to conduct large-scale interviews.

• Conduct training session to coordination and control interviewers’ behaviors.

• The training session should start with a brief introduction of the study.

Coordination and Control II

• Proceed with discussion of general guideline and procedures

• Specifications: explanatory and clarifying comments about handling difficult situations

Telephone Surveys

• Decades ago, telephone survey based on telephone subscriber list produces bias because poor people do not have telephone.

• A survey in 1993 indicated that 93.4% of housing units had telephones, which drastically reduced the selection bias of telephone survey.

Telephone Surveys

• Telephone interviews minimize interviewers’ personal influence on responses.

• Sometimes, telephone interviews work better than face-to-face interviews by protecting interviewers and interviewees.

Problems with Telephone Survey

• Bogus surveys hamper the effectiveness of real telephone surveys

• Interviewees are more likely to terminate the interviews by hanging up.

• Many residents use answer machines to screen down calls including survey calls. Things are getting worse if those use answer machines to screen phone calls are significantly different from those who do not in some respects.

CATI

• Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI)

• Interviewers sit in front of a computer terminal wearing a headphone

• A central computer is programmed to randomly select a phone number and dials it

• The computer terminal displays the question interviews will ask

CATI 2

• If the respondents answer the phone, interviewers continue to ask the first question displayed on her terminal and entered the response into the computer system, which will be stored in a database

• Otherwise, interviewers will do nothing and the central computer will randomly select another phone number to dial.

Other New Technologies

• CAPI: Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing

• CASI: Computer Assisted Self-Interviewing

• CSAQ: Computerized Self-Administered Questionnaire

• TDE: touchtone Data Entry

• VR: Voice Recognition

• Fax Survey

• Internet Survey

Comparison

• A Table of ComparisonCost Quality of

DataResponse Rate

Representativeness

Self-administered

Face-to-face

Telephone

Online

Strengths of Survey Research

• Good representativeness

• Large samples feasible

• Design and questions flexible

• Good measurement reliability

Weakness of Survey Research

• Unable to capture idiosyncratic characteristics of respondents/informants

• Unable to capture unique context of respondents social background

• Unable to amend standardized questionnaire in the middle of survey

• Artificiality: validity concerns

Use Secondary Data

• Download data online• GSS

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu:8080/GSS/homepage.htm

• Michigan Datasethttp://www.icpsr.umich.edu

• Roper Survey Centerhttp://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/

Use Secondary Data II• Public Polls

http://www.pollingthenations.com/

• UC Berkeley Survey Research Center

http://sda.berkeley.edu:7502/

• Purdue Center

http://www.thearda.com/arda.asp