Interviewer effects in telephone surveys on political topics are likely to occur. The literature has yielded considerable evidence about the impact of basic interviewer characteristics, but research is lacking on how interviewers' beliefs may shape responses. This study is aimed at assessing the association between the interviewers' party…

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…

In this study, we examine the effect of providing examples in the responses to a question about multitasking. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions: the first group received one set of examples (watching TV or watching kids), the second group received a different set of examples (walking or talking with…

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…

When and how to survey potential respondents is often determined by budgetary and external constraints, but choice of survey modality may have enormous implications for data quality. Different survey modalities may be differentially susceptible to measurement error attributable to interviewer assignment, known as interviewer effects. In this…

Questionnaire design texts commonly recommend emphasizing important words, including capitalization or underlining, to promote their processing by the respondent. In self-administered surveys, respondents can see the emphasis, but in an interviewer-administered survey, emphasis has to be communicated to respondents through audible signals. We…

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…

Conversation analysts have described the formation of actions and the sequential organization of talk in a wide variety of contexts and offer resources that can be used to study interaction in the interview. Conversational practices are relevant before and during the survey interview: First, the process of recruiting sample members to become…

Measuring respondents' attitudes is a crucial task in numerous social science disciplines. A popular way to measure attitudes is to use survey questions with rating scales. However, research has shown that especially the design of rating scales can have a profound impact on respondents' answer behavior. While some scale design aspects, such as…

To explore socially desirable responding in telephone surveys, this study examines response latencies in answers to 27 questions in a corpus of 319 audio-recorded voice interviews on iPhones. Response latencies were compared when respondents (a) answered questions on sensitive vs. nonsensitive topics (as classified by online raters); (b) produced…

This paper analyzes the risks to child development and school readiness among children under age 6 in Pakistan. Drawing on a nationally representative telephone survey conducted in the midst of a global pandemic, between December 2021 and February 2022, we present the first nationally representative estimates of child development for children…

Dual-frame, random-digit-dialing (DFRDD) surveys, using a frame of landline telephone numbers and a frame of cell phone numbers, have become the norm for telephone surveys. Two alternative frame constructions sample exclusively from a cell phone frame, referred to as the 'single-frame cell,' and sample from the listed landline frame and the cell…