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Ethnoracial identity refers to the racial and ethnic categories that people use to classify themselves and others. How it is measured in surveys has implications for understanding inequalities. Yet how people self-identify may not conform to the categories standardized survey questions use to measure ethnicity and race, leading to potential measurement error. In interviewer-administered surveys, answers to survey questions are achieved through interviewer–respondent interaction. An analysis of interviewer–respondent interaction can illuminate whether, when, how, and why respondents experience problems with questions. In this study, we examine how indicators of interviewer–respondent interactional problems vary across ethnoracial groups when respondents answer questions about ethnicity and race. Further, we explore how interviewers respond in the presence of these interactional problems. Data are provided by the 2013–2014 Voices Heard Survey, a computer-assisted telephone survey designed to measure perceptions of participating in medical research among an ethnoracially diverse sample of respondents.
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Response Times as an Indicator of Data Quality: Associations with Question, Interviewer, and Respondent Characteristics in a Health Survey of Diverse Respondents
Response time (RT) – the time elapsing from the beginning of question reading for a given question until the start of the next question – is a potentially important indicator of data quality that can be reliably measured for all questions in a computer-administered survey using a latent timer (i.e., triggered automatically by moving on to the next question). In interviewer-administered surveys, RTs index data quality by capturing the entire length of time spent on a question–answer sequence, including interviewer question-asking behaviors and respondent question-answering behaviors. Consequently, longer RTs may indicate longer processing or interaction on the part of the interviewer, respondent, or both. RTs are an indirect measure of data quality; they do not directly measure reliability or validity, and we do not directly observe what factors lengthen the administration time. In addition, either too long or too short RTs could signal a problem (Ehlen, Schober, and Conrad 2007). However, studies that link components of RTs (interviewers’ question reading and response latencies) to interviewer and respondent behaviors that index data quality strengthen the claim that RTs indicate data quality (Bergmann and Bristle 2019; Draisma and Dijkstra 2004; Olson, Smyth, and Kirchner 2019). In general, researchers tend to consider longer RTs as signaling processing problems for the interviewer, respondent, or both (Couper and Kreuter 2013; Olson and Smyth 2015; Yan and Olson 2013; Yan and Tourangeau 2008). Previous work demonstrates that RTs are associated with various characteristics of interviewers (where applicable), questions, and respondents in web, telephone, and face-to-face interviews (e.g., Couper and Kreuter 2013; Olson and Smyth 2015; Yan and Tourangeau 2008). We replicate and extend this research by examining how RTs are associated with various question characteristics and several established tools for evaluating questions. We also examine whether increased interviewer experience in the study shortens RTs for questions with characteristics that impact the complexity of the interviewer’s task (i.e., interviewer instructions and parenthetical phrases). We examine these relationships in the context of a sample of racially diverse respondents who answered questions about participation in medical research and their health.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1853094
- PAR ID:
- 10186206
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Interviewer Effects from a Total Survey Error Perspective
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 252-265
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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