Self-Administered Questions by Telephone: Evaluating Interactive Voice Response

Over the past 25 years, computerization has swept over survey research, making computer-assisted data collection the de facto standard in the United States and Western Europe (Couper and Nicholls 1998). The move to computerization may now be ushering in a golden age for self-administered questions; the newest methods of survey data collection to emerge have reduced the role of the interviewer or eliminated it entirely, allowing the respondents to interact directly with the computer. The new modes of self-administered data collection include Web surveys and a technology variously referred to as interactive voice response (IVR), touchtone data entry (TDE), and telephone audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (T-ACASI). These different labels refer to the same data collection technology in which the computer plays a recording of the questions to the respondents over the telephone, who indicate their answers by pressing keys on the handsets (Appel, Tortora, and Sigman 1992; Blyth 1997; Frankovic 1994; Gribble et al. 2000; Harrell and Clayton 1991; Phipps and Tupek 1990; Turner et al. 1996b, 1998). We will refer to this method of data collection as IVR, the term used at Gallup and at most market research firms. Automated telephone systems for gathering nonsurvey information are now widespread (e.g., for catalog sales, airline reservations, banking, and so on)