A number of previous studies have shown that the direction of rating scales may affect the distribution of responses. There is also considerable evidence that the cognitive process of answering a survey question differ by survey mode, which suggests that scale direction effects may interact with mode effects. The aim of this study was to explore…

Ethnoracial identity refers to the racial and ethnic categories that people use to classify themselves and others. How it is measured in surveys has implications for understanding inequalities. Yet how people self-identify may not conform to the categories standardized survey questions use to measure ethnicity and race, leading to potential…

Telephone survey interviewers need to be able to accurately record answers to questions. While straightforward for closed questions, this task can be complicated for open questions. We examine interviewer recording accuracy rates from a national landline random digit dial telephone survey. We find that accuracy rates are over 90% for numeric…

Guidelines for conducting surveys by mobile phone calls in low- and middle-income countries suggest keeping interviews short (<20 minutes). The evidence supporting this recommendation is scant, even though limiting interview duration might reduce the amount of data generated by such surveys. We recruited nearly 2,500 mobile phone users in…

This study examines the effect of telephone survey dialing patterns on lab productivity and survey responses. Using an original data set of paradata from 2010 to 2017 and a machine learning technique for variable selection, we find that early and late afternoon shifts are as productive as late evening shifts for both landline and cellphone Random…

Telephone surveys face more and more criticism because of decreasing coverage and increasing costs, and the risk of producing socially desirable answers. Consequently, survey administrators consider switching their surveys to the web mode, although the web mode is more susceptible to item nonresponse. Still, we do not know whether this is true for…

Specific interviewer characteristics, interviewer continuity, or matching interviewer and household characteristics may increase cooperation, especially for difficult-to-convince households. In face-to-face surveys, unobserved heterogeneity often makes a proper analysis of interviewer effects impossible. Although surveys conducted in telephone…

To reduce nonresponse bias in surveys, it has been suggested that researchers allocate additional fieldwork efforts to cases with low estimated response propensity. If these efforts are successful, nonresponse bias may be reduced by changing the variance of response propensities and hence the covariance between response propensities and variables…

Behavior coding is used to detect issues in questionnaires by flagging interactions between survey respondents and interviewers when their interactions deviate from standardized interviewing. It has become a popular method for evaluating survey questionnaire quality and has been used mostly in Western countries, with little research being done in…

As an aural mode, an interviewer's voice is an important part of telephone surveys. A speaker's voice can convey information about his or her trustworthiness and confidence, among other attributes. Consequently, respondents may perceive attributes of interviewers from their voices. We evaluated how five perceived attributes of interviewers…

We describe an experiment to provide a time-limited incentive among a random sample of 594 hard-to-reach respondents, 200 of whom were offered the incentive to complete all survey components of a study during a three-week winter holiday period. Sample members were primary caregivers of children included in the 2014 Child Development Supplement to…

Although using random digit dialing (RDD) telephone samples was the preferred method for conducting surveys of households for many years, declining response and coverage rates have led researchers to explore alternative approaches. The use of address-based sampling (ABS) has been examined for sampling the general population and subgroups, most…

Growing rates of nonresponse to telephone surveys can contribute to nonresponse error, and interviewers contribute differentially to nonresponse. Why do some telephone interviewers have better response rates than others? This study uncovered a critical behavior of successful telephone interviewers over the course of introductions: responsive…

Acquiescence is often defined as the systematic selection of agreeable ("strongly agree") or affirmative ("yes") responses to survey items, regardless of item content or directionality. This definition implies that acquiescence is immune to item characteristics; however, the influence of item characteristics on acquiescence…

I analyze the effects of household sociodemography, interviewer performance in the current survey, and fieldwork characteristics on cooperation in a central telephone survey, where households with no publicly listed landline number receive face-to-face visits. Using the 2013 refreshment sample of the Swiss Household Panel, I employ…