Aids

Key terms

Main points

1. Gaining the trust and confidence of respondents is called establishing rapport. Establishing rapport quickly with respondents is essential for interviewing.
2. Interviewers should be thoroughly familiar with the questionnaire being used before beginning interviews.
3. Structured interviewing requires skill, tact, patience, maintenance of a neutral role, care in asking all questions in the same way and in the same order, evaluation of responses, use of probes to clarify or expand responses, and careful and complete recording of responses.
4. Surveys can also be conducted using a qualitative approach, based on unstructured interviewing. With this technique, the interviewer uses broad questions to get the respondent talking and then focuses the conversation on topics of interest to the interviewer. Reponses are recorded either on audio tape or in the form of notes that are later developed into a more detail record of the respondent's responses.
5. Immediately after each interview, interviewers should check the questionnaire to make sure a clear, useable response has been obtained for each item and to write out responses as completely as possible from notes taken for responses to open-ended items.
6. The validity, reliability, and accuracy of responses depend on the interaction of the interviewer with respondents; the settings in which interviews take place; reactions of respondents to the process of being interviewed; and, depending on local norms, the social characteristics of the interviewer relative to the respondents.
7. The response rate is the percentage of successful, completed interviews over the expected number. With personal interviewing, return rates of 80% or higher are expected. Rates are lower, often below 30%, for surveys based on self-administered questionnaires.
8. When the response rate is less than about 50%, the sample no longer can be considered representative of the target population from which it was selected. Conclusions from the sample, therefore, have limited value, and cannot be safely generalized to the target population.
   
   

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