Slow Down!

I was out of town for several days while a telephone survey project was going on at my office.  When I got back to work and started editing the completed interviews I noticed some odd things in the data.  I cannot give too many details without violating the client’s confidentiality, but I can say that it was a problem that I anticipated before I left town.  I briefed our interviewers on the project the night before I caught my flight to Phoenix to visit my mother.

The survey was one that we have conducted almost every year for the last several years.  The sample for the survey is retired people and the questions with the weird answers can be confusing to people of any age.  We ask people to calculate percentages of their household income.  When I briefed the project last week I told interviewers to slow down, especially when reading these questions.  I reminded the interviewers that we are interviewing people in their 70s, 80s and 90s, so they might not hear or completely understand the questions if the interviewer reads too fast.  One of the interviewers, a man in his 70s, said in the briefing that he was offended by this.  I replied that I was basing the instruction on my experience with the project.  I knew that we would have problems if the interviewers did not slow down.

A good interviewer will mirror their pace to the pace at which a respondent speaks.  A good interviewer will also listen for when a respondent is not listening and re-read questions as appropriate.  Our questionnaires are written with certain words EMPHASIZED so that respondents have a clearer understanding of what we are asking.  When I brief and coach interviewers, I usually tell them to emphasize sibilant words.  Words such as “IF” and “BOTH” do not travel well over the telephone, so respondents sometimes do not hear them.  When this happens, respondents often become confused by the question or think we are asking a different question.

I held a meeting with the interviewers on my first day back at work, before we started the dialing shift.  I told them I was cutting off their coffee until they slowed down.

Don't Get Discouraged

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”  Calvin Coolidge

We finished a huge telephone survey project yesterday.  By huge, I mean 1,000 interviews.  We usually conduct 300 or 400 interviews on a project.  On the last few days of the project I held very brief pre-shift meetings.  These meetings were quite brief.  The purpose was to tell the interviewers not to get discouraged.

It is easy to get discouraged during the last few days of a survey project involving random digit dialing.  We ask to speak to the person in the household who is having the next birthday.  We almost always have quotas by gender, and we almost always fill our quotas of women before we fill our quotas of men.  When we fill our quotas of women, we call random households and ask to speak to the man in the household who is having the next birthday.  It takes many calls to find a man who is willing to participate in a survey.  This project was even more difficult because we had to interview people between the ages of 18 and 55.

I have conducted interviews on and supervised many such projects.  An interviewer can sit on the phone for an hour and listen to answering machine messages and busy signals.  When someone finally answers the phone, they tell you to take their number off the list.  Another hour goes by.  A woman answers the phone.  She says that her husband is not home and he doesn’t do surveys anyway.  Fifteen minutes later a man answers the phone.  He says to unrandomly select another household for the survey.

It is important for an interviewer not to get discouraged because if he or she gets discouraged, he or she will sound discouraged.  If an interviewer sounds discouraged, a respondent will be less likely to want to participate in the survey.  This makes it even more difficult to get the last few interviews needed to finish the project.

Our recent survey was not as difficult as a project we did last year.  We did a survey in which respondents had to be 25 or older and thinking about going back to school in the next six months.  After we filled our quotas of women on that project, we had shifts in which we completed one or no interviews.  That is how I knew that I needed to give our interviewers some encouragement on our recent project.