Informed Consent Procedures in Telephone Interviews

This study experiments with different ways of informing respondents about a survey in order to see how such diffrrences affect the quality of the data collected and the meaning of the experience fir them. Extending earlier work on informed consent in personal interviews, it replicates essential features of the earlier study in telephone interviews with an RDD sample. Two factors were varied in the present study: information (about the content of the inter view, and information about its purpose. Neither of these significantly affected the response rate to the survey as a whole, item nonresponse, or response quality. The response rate WaVS highest among those respondents given the most information about the survey's content and purpose, but again not significantly so. There was, however, a suggestion that nonresponse to the most sensitive items on the questionnaire may have been adversely affected by disclosure ojfthe study's methodological purpose. Byjfar the largest variation in response rate to the survey occurred among interviewers, rather than as a result of the experimentally varied survey introductions.