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Live video (LV) communication tools (e.g., Zoom) have the potential to provide survey researchers with many of the benefits of in-person interviewing, while also greatly reducing data collection costs, given that interviewers do not need to travel and make in-person visits to sampled households. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of in-person data collection to public health crises, forcing survey researchers to explore remote data collection modes—such as LV interviewing—that seem likely to yield high-quality data without in-person interaction. Given the potential benefits of these technologies, the operational and methodological aspects of video interviewing have started to receive research attention from survey methodologists. Although it is remote, video interviewing still involves respondent–interviewer interaction that introduces the possibility of interviewer effects. No research to date has evaluated this potential threat to the quality of the data collected in video interviews. This research note presents an evaluation of interviewer effects in a recent experimental study of alternative approaches to video interviewing including both LV interviewing and the use of prerecorded videos of the same interviewers asking questions embedded in a web survey (“prerecorded video” interviewing). We find little evidence of significant interviewer effects when using these two approaches, which is a promising result. We also find that when interviewer effects were present, they tended to be slightly larger in the LV approach as would be expected in light of its being an interactive approach. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research using video interviewing. 

This paper summarizes a set of design considerations that survey researchers exploring the potential for live video to substitute for in-person interviewing will need to address. While the solutions appropriate for a particular study are likely to vary, researchers will need to consider (at least) which sample members have access to video and will be willing and able to participate, which video platform(s) to use, whether interviews need to be scheduled in advance or are conducted on demand, how interviewers’ screens should be configured, the interviewer’s visual background and auditory environment, and how interviewers should be trained to administer video interviews, avoid bias, and be prepared to handle technological problems as they arise.