Thinking inside the Box: The Art of Telephone Interviewing

EXCERPT

Field Methods, Vol. 15, No. 2, Month 2004 1–12

DOI: 10.1177/1525822X04263329

© 2004 Sage Publications

In the past quarter century, the technology for conducting telephone interviews has

changed significantly. Fundamental interviewing concepts, however, have changed

little. This article examines the art of telephone interviewing from the perspective of

a telephone surveyer. Through her experiences, the author shows how mastering the

production and interpretation of sounds is a key communication tool for producing

successful and informative interviews.

Keywords: telephone interviews; interview skills; interviewer training; survey

research; qualitative research

More than twenty-five years ago, Jean Converse and Howard Schuman

(1974) wrote Conversations at Random: Survey Research As Interviewers

See It. Through their experience on many large surveys, Converse and

Schuman provided important insights into conducting face-to-face interviews.

Although many of their fundamental recommendations have

remained the same, survey research has changed substantially in the past

quarter century.

Today, more and more survey research is being conducted over the telephone.

Early in telephone survey research history, researchers tackled such

problems as how to convince respondents to be interviewed over the telephone

(Reingen and Kernan 1977), how to deal with the invasiveness of such

calls (Hagan and Collier 1983), how to reduce telephone interviewer effects

(Tucker 1983), and how to design optimal call scheduling (Weeks, Kulka,

and Pierson 1987). Such lessons have been summarized in classic books on

the subject (Lavrakas 1987) and have been incorporated into most standard

social science research methods texts. As telephone surveying has become

more ubiquitous in our daily lives, the methods of data collection have diversified

to fit a growing range of research needs (Taylor 1997). Researchers now

recognize that they often need to make explicit trade-offs between standardization

and rapport (Lavin and Maynard 2001).

Unlike face-to-face interviews in which interviewers can read facial

expression and body language and respond accordingly, interviewers who

conduct telephone interviews are constrained by what they can hear and say.

The visual cues that most of us rely on so heavily in our everyday interactions

are stripped away. We are left to engage total strangers in conversation with

the power of our words and voice and, like the blind, draw heavily on our

hearing to understand meaning and nuance.

At its core, telephone interviewing is about mastering the production and

interpretation of sounds. It is as much about knowing how to speak as how to

listen. Good interviewers know what to say, how to say it, and when to

deliver it. Equally, they know how to listen, how to interpret, and how to

react. Although fundamental to the interaction between interviewer and

respondent, the ability to listen and speak also plays a key role in the communication

between research team members.

In this essay, I outline different problems a telephone interviewer is likely

to encounter and provide, more generally, a context for the art of telephone

interviewing. I draw on my experiences doing long and short telephone interviews,

conducting door-to-door canvassing for the Gallup Poll, and engaging

in in-depth face-to-face interviews as both a research assistant and as a

project manager. I begin by describing what I encountered when I managed a

large telephone survey and conclude with a series of pragmatic lessons.