Effects of speech rate, pitch, and pausing 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 what they hear over the phone. Yet interviewers vary widely in how often their invitations lead to participation, suggesting that potential respondents may give considerable weight not only to the content of such invitations, but the style, rhythm, phrasing, and other prosodic attributes of interviewers. We examine the impact of three prosodic attributes of interviewers: speech rate, pitch, and pausing, on the outcome of specific telephone survey invitations, agree-to-participate, scheduled-callback, and refusal, in a corpus of 1380 audio-recorded survey introductions (contacts). Agreement was highest when interviewers spoke at a moderate rate (3.5 words/sec) and paused at a moderate rate as well, at least once during the invitation but not more than about once every other conversational turn. The median interviewer pitch in successful contacts with both male and female interviewers was significantly lower than in refusals. However, variation in pitch functioned differently for each sex, with increased pitch variability more helpful for female interviewers but hurtful for male interviewers. We interpret the advantage of moderate speaking and pausing rates in this corpus as indicative of respondent preference for extemporaneous and competent deliveries, and dispreference for overly scripted deliveries." (Text excerpt, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Benkí, J., Broome, J., Conrad, F., Groves, R. & Kreuter, F. (2011): Effects of speech rate, pitch, and pausing on survey participation decisions. In: American Statistical Association (Hrsg.) (2011): JSM proceedings, p. 5947-5956.