Interviewer Effects on Cooperation during Initial and Refusal Conversion Fieldwork Phases in Telephone Panel Surveys

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 centers usually assign households to interviewers at random, there is less research on interviewer effects on cooperation, probably because telephone surveys produce smaller effects. Using data from a large telephone panel survey, I find interviewer effects only for households that refused to participate in a previous wave. Interviewer continuity or matching interviewers and households on sociodemographic variables has weak effects for any type of household. Interviewer experience has positive effects for previously refusing households only. Telephone survey organizations therefore only need to worry about using specially trained interviewers for refusal conversion calls, while specific assignments of interviewers to households are not necessary.

Panel Attrition: How Important is Interviewer Continuity?

We assess whether the probability of a sample member cooperating at a particular wave of a panel survey is greater if the same interviewer is deployed as at the previous wave. Previous research on this topic mainly uses nonexperimental data. Consequently, a) interviewer change is generally nonrandom, and b) continuing interviewers are more experienced by the time of the next wave. Our study is based on a balanced experiment in which both interviewer continuity and experience are controlled. Multilevel multiple membership models are used to explore the effects of interviewer continuity on refusal rate as well as interactions of interviewer continuity with other variables. We find that continuity reduces refusal propensity for younger respondents but not for older respondents, and that this effect depends on the age of the interviewer. This supports the notion that interviewer continuity may be beneficial in some situations, but not necessarily in others.