Collaborative Research: Acoustic Properties, Listener Perceptions, and Outcomes of Interactions between Survey Interviewers and Sample Persons

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While the sample survey is one of the cornerstones of social science research methods, the tool is experiencing large declines in participation of sampled persons. This project studies participation in cross-section Random-Digit Dialed (RDD) telephone surveys. The declines have led to such significant research cost increases that serious consideration of terminating basic surveys is occurring. One large source of variation in RDD cooperation rates is the interviewer. In centralized telephone interviewing facilities interviewers are often assigned similar mixes of cases, yet obtain very different response rates. All the stimuli yielding a decision to participate in an RDD survey must be delivered through audio channel - through words, pitch, inflection, and pacing of the interviewers' speech. These attributes are not the traditional objects of study of survey methodologists. Hence, the project combines insights from speech science, phonetics, psycholinguistics, and survey methodology. A central conceptual framework utilizes the companion notions of tailoring, convergence, and similarity in cooperative dyadic communication. 5,000 digital audio recordings of RDD telephone interviewer introductions (from two data collection organizations, 6 different surveys, and 165 different interviewers) are transformed into a quantitative data set suitable for dynamic and static statistical models of response propensities. Acoustic measures motivated by concepts from speech science are extracted using Praat acoustic software; raters make judgments of perceived attributes of speakers using both concepts central to leverage-salience theory and the social psychology; and word and disfluency rates are extracted from transcriptions of the audio files. The resulting data set is a relational one with records at the levels of the interviewer, respondent (case), contact, and conversational turn. Hierarchical and survival models are built using the combined conceptual frameworks predicting the final participation decision of a sample case. While the research emphasizes basic science, it has potential practical outcomes. Academic survey research is a crucial tool for a $15 billion commercial research industry in the US; this project's success can contribute to the health of this commercial sector.