Interviewer-administered data collection, such as personal or telephone surveys, may generate interviewer effects in different areas. Interviewers are apt to differ not only in the respondent numbers they reach, but in the specific content-related measurement results they achieve. Thus, frequent deviations occur in the rounding of results or in nonresponse rates. Although many studies report interviewer effects, only few are able to explain them. One reason is that information about interviewers is usually confined to a small set of demographic characteristics. This project has set out to better understand and explain interviewer effects with the help of a questionnaire for interviewers participating in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The questionnaire was prepared in collaboration with scientists from the International Workshop on Household Survey Nonresponse, and seeks to assess interviewer traits that are presumed to influence the behavior of interviewees. It was implemented for the first time in the fourth wave of the German and French SHARE study and was expanded to other SHARE countries since wave five. It has led to a publication in "Survey Methods: Insights from the Field" with Annelies Blom (University of Mannheim)
This project is coordinated by Maria Jose Mendoza and Tessa Hanneman since 2019.
