READING FAST, READING SLOW: THE EFFECT OF INTERVIEWERS' SPEED IN READING INTRODUCTORY TEXTS ON RESPONSE BEHAVIOR
READING FAST, READING SLOW: THE EFFECT OF INTERVIEWERS' SPEED IN READING INTRODUCTORY TEXTS ON RESPONSE BEHAVIOR
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DOI：
10.1093/jssam/smy027
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发表时间：
2020-04-01
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
Bristle, Johanna
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Bergmann, Michael;Bristle, Johanna
面试官指南通常包括准确阅读问题文本的说明。偏离这些标准化访谈指南可能会影响调查答案的可比性并损害数据质量。本文通过分析访调员在实地考察期间如何改变阅读行为以及这种行为变化是否影响调查受访者的反应行为，为有关访调员行为的文献做出了贡献。我们使用来自欧洲健康、老龄化和退休调查 (SHARE) 的项目级参数数据来衡量访调员的阅读时间，并将我们的分析重点放在不需要受访者立即回答的介绍性问题上。与之前的研究相比，这种关注使我们能够将访谈者的阅读时间与受访者的反应时间区分开来。基于固定效应回归，我们的结果显示访谈者阅读介绍性项目的时间发生了系统性变化：首先，即使在控制了相关受访者特征和访谈情况的具体方面之后，阅读时间在调查现场期间也显着减少。其次，包括十四个欧洲国家和以色列在内的跨国比较显示，几乎所有国家的下降趋势都是一致的，这表明其在不同文化背景下具有普遍性。第三，阅读时间的减少不同程度地影响了反应行为。如果介绍中包含用于理解或完成所需任务的相关信息，特别是当响应涉及调查内的请求时，响应行为就会受到影响。根据这些发现，我们讨论了问卷设计、访谈员培训和实地工作监测可能产生的后果。
Guidelines for interviewers frequently include instructions to read question texts exactly as they are worded. Deviations from these guidelines on standardized interviewing might affect the comparability of survey answers and impair the quality of data. This paper contributes to the literature on interviewer behavior by analyzing how interviewers change their reading behavior during fieldwork and whether this behavioral change influences the response behavior of survey respondents. We use item-level paradata from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to measure interviewers' reading times and focus our analyses on introductory questions that do not require an immediate response by the respondent. In contrast to prior research, this focus enables us to disentangle the reading times of interviewers from the response times of respondents. Based on fixed effects regression, our results show systematic changes in interviewers' reading times of introductory items: First, reading times significantly decrease over the survey's field period, even after controlling for relevant respondent characteristics and specific aspects of the interview situation. Second, a cross-national comparison, including fourteen European countries plus Israel, reveals that the decrease is uniform in almost all countries, suggesting its generalizability across different cultural contexts. Third, the decrease in reading times influences response behavior to varying degrees. Response behavior is affected if introductions contain relevant information for understanding or fulfilling the required task and especially if the response refers to within-survey requests. On the basis of these findings, we discuss the possible consequences for questionnaire design, interviewer training, and fieldwork monitoring.