The Effect of Interviewer Personality, Skills and Attitudes on Respondent Co-operation with Face-to-face Surveys
| Title | The Effect of Interviewer Personality, Skills and Attitudes on Respondent Co-operation with Face-to-face Surveys |
| Author(s) | Annette Jackle, Peter Lynn, Jennifer Sinibaldi, Sarah Tipping |
| Organisation | ISER University of Essex |
| Date | June 2011 |
| No. of pages | 33 |
| Key words | Research interviewing; qualitative interviews |
| Description | The paper examines the role of interviewers’ experience, attitudes, personality traits and inter-personal skills in determining survey co-operation. We take the perspective that these characteristics influence interviewers’ behaviour and influence the doorstep interaction between interviewers and sample member. We use a large sample of 842 face-to-face interviewers working for a major survey institute and analyse co-operation outcomes for over 100,000 cases contacted by those interviewers over a 13-month period. |
| Select quotations | “…interviewer experience is predictive of success: co-operation probabilities increase linearly with experience…” “…we find weak support for previous findings that interviewer attitudes toward the legitimacy and usefulness of persuading reluctant respondents are predictive of co-operation.” “…we find some evidence that interviewer personality traits are associated with co-operation: co-operation probabilities are higher for more extrovert interviewers and for interviewers who are less open.” “We find only modest evidence that inter-personal skills…are predictive of co-operation…after controlling additionally for interviewer attitudes and personality traits, only the effect of assertiveness remains significant.” “…there is also some support for the idea that higher response rates amongst female interviewers are the result of women scoring higher on the personality traits, skills and attitudes positively related to co-operation.” “It would seem worthwhile to train interviewers to not be too assertive, to demonstrate to them that reluctant respondents do not necessarily provide poor data, and to give them confidence that most people can be persuaded and they should accept a refusal lightly.” |
| Link | http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/iser/2011-14 |
