The Influence of Interviewers' Contact Behavior on the Contact and Cooperation Rate in Face-to-Face Household Surveys

In surveys, interviewers serve as the agents of data collection. Their task includes contacting the target persons, gaining their cooperation, and conducting the interviews according to the rules of standardized interviewing. Interviewers are not equally successful at doing their job. They differ both in the quality of the data collected and in the response rate they achieve (Biemer & Lyberg, 2003, pp. 110–11, p. 156ff.). It is often difficult to distinguish to what extent these differences arise from differences among interviewers or from differences between the areas (and the target persons, living in these areas) assigned to the interviewers. Research using interpenetrated sample designs, however, has shown that interviewer effects can remain strong even when area effects are controlled (Campanelli & O’Muircheartaigh, 1999). The reasons for the different response rates between interviewers are still not totally clear. In their summary of the research literature on this topic, Groves and Couper (1998, p. 191) conclude that demographic interviewer characteristics like gender and age play a minor role in gaining cooperation. The same holds for stable interviewer personality characteristics such as extraversion. What do seem to be important factors are interviewer experience, expectations and attitudes, and the behavior of the interviewers in their interaction with the respondents. However, in an international comparative study Hox and De Leeuw (2002) found that interviewer attributes, attitudes, and avowed behaviors explained only a small part of the variation in nonresponse rates between countries.