The Effect of Interviewer Characteristics and Expectations on Response

This study reports on two sets of findings related to interviewer effects, derived from a national RDD sample of the adult population. The first of these concerns the effect of interviewer characteristics and expectations on overall cooperation rates; the second, the effect of interviewer characteristics and expectations on item nonresponse and response quality. We found that interviewers' age, the size of the interviewing assignment, and interviewers' expectations all had a strong effect on overall cooperation rates; the relation of experience to response rate was curvilinear in this sample. Age and education have consistent but statistically insignificant effects on item nonresponse. The effect of interviewers' expectations on responses within the interview resembles that in earlier studies, but is less pronounced and less consistent. Eleanor Singer is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for the Social Sciences. Martin R. Frankel is Professor of Statistics at Baruch College, CUNY. Marc B. Glassman is an independent statistical consultant in New York City. The authors wish to thank Ed Blair, Charles F. Cannell, Howard Schuman, and Seymour Sudman for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of the paper. The research was made possible by grant SES-78-19797 to the senior author. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 47:68-83 ? 1983 by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co, Inc. 0033-362X/83/0047-68/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.67 on Wed, 27 Apr 2016 06:33:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms EFECT OF INTERVIEWER CHARACTERISTICS 69 interviews, where typically fewer interviewers take a much larger number of interviews. Consequently, the effect of each interviewer's performance on response rate and response quality is magnified many times. At the same time, the fact that each interviewer on a telephone survey can be assigned to a random sample of respondents makes such effects easier to investigate and avoids the methodological weaknesses plaguing the studies by Singer and Kohnke-Aguirre and by Sudman et al., namely, the confounding of area and interviewer