Do Interviewers with High Cooperation Rates Behave Differently? Interviewer Cooperation Rates and Interview Behaviors

Olson, Kristen, Antje Kirchner, and Jolene D. Smyth. "Do Interviewers with High Cooperation Rates Behave Differently? Interviewer Cooperation Rates and Interview Behaviors." Survey Practice 9, no. 2 (2016): no pp., available at http://www.surveypractice.org/index.php/SurveyPractice/article/view/351.
Interviewers are required to be flexible in responding to respondent concerns during recruitment, but standardized during administration of the questionnaire. These skill sets may be at odds. Recent research has shown a U-shaped relationship between interviewer cooperation rates and interviewer variance: the least and the most successful interviewers during recruitment have the largest interviewer variance components. Little is known about why this association occurs. We posit four hypotheses for this association: 1) interviewers with higher cooperation rates more conscientious interviewers altogether, 2) interviewers with higher cooperation rates continue to use rapport behaviors from the cooperation request throughout an interview, 3) interviewers with higher cooperation rates display more confidence which translates into different interview behavior, and 4) interviewers with higher cooperation rates continue their flexible interviewing style throughout the interview and deviate more from standardized interviewing. We use behavior codes from the Work and Leisure Today Survey (n=450, AAPOR RR3=6.3%) to evaluate interviewer behavior. Our results largely support the confidence hypothesis. Interviewers with higher cooperation rates do not show evidence of being “better” interviewers.