Over the past few years, more and more studies have started the collection of biomeasures in social surveys as objective measurements of the respondent’s health. A very promising new biomeasure is the collection of dried blood spots, as this new technology allows analyzing meaningful and objective blood parameters from only a few drops of blood. The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) tested this new method in the fourth wave in the German subsample and will implement it also in many other countries in the sixth wave of SHARE.
It is obvious that this new method is a very promising enrichment of the survey data. Nevertheless, implementing such methods also creates new challenges for the interviewers conducting the interviews. They have not only to ask for the respondents’ consent but are also the ones who have to conduct the measurement.
This projects aims at understanding the role of the interviewer when collecting blood spots. The results of the Wave 4 pretest are analyzed in combination with information about the interviewers which are collected in the interviewer survey. The goal is to learn more about which characteristics of the interviewers have an influence on the respondent’s decision to consent to the collection of blood spots. The results
show that the interviewers have large effect on this consent request. In addition, the information collected in the interviewer survey can explain most of the variance on the
interviewer level.