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.