To agree or not to agree? Impact of interviewer speech on survey participation decisions

Abstract

"When potential respondents consider whether or not to participate in a telephone interview, they have very little information about the interviewer, aside from how he/she sounds, speaks and interacts. Yet interviewers vary widely in how often their invitations lead to participation, suggesting that potential respondents may give considerable weight to interviewers' verbal attributes. We examine the impact of three interactional behaviors: disfluencies (um, uh), backchannels (mm-hmm, I see), and simultaneous speech, on the outcome of specific telephone survey invitations, agree-to-participate, scheduled-callback, and refusal, in a corpus of 1215 audio-recorded survey introductions (contacts). Agreement was highest when interviewers were moderately disfluent. Further, in contacts where 'answerers' ultimately agreed to participate, they displayed more backchannels than when they refused. Finally, there was more simultaneous speech in contacts where answerers ultimately refused to participate, but interviewers interrupted answerers more when they scheduled a callback, perhaps reflecting their attempt to salvage the contact. We conclude by discussing next analytic steps, as well as practical implications for interviewer hiring and training." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Benki, J., Broome, J., Conrad, F., Groves, R., Kreuter, F. & Vannette, D. (2010): To agree or not to agree? Impact of interviewer speech on survey participation decisions. In: American Statistical Association (Hrsg.) (2010): Proceedings of the Survey Research Methods Section, American Statistical Association (2010) (Proceedings of the Survey Research Methods Section, American Statistical Association, 2010).