Interviewer and respondent behaviours when measuring change with dependent interviewing

Presenter: Annette Jäckle, ISER

Author: Annette Jäckle

Co-author(s): Tarek Al Baghal

Most panel surveys use dependent interviewing as a method of reducing spurious changes between interviews in responses to key factual questions. With proactive dependent interviewing respondents are reminded of their response in the previous interview before being asked about their current situation. There are however different ways in which this question can be worded. For example in Understanding Society some dependent interviewing questions ask respondents ‘Is this still the case?’, while other questions ask ‘Has this changed?’ In this study we report on experiments carried in the Understanding Society Innovation Panel that were designed to test how best to word proactive dependent interviewing questions. Interviews were audio-recorded so that interviewer and respondent behaviours could be coded. Initial results of the behaviour coded data from Wave 3 suggests that the ‘remind, changed?’ question format was problematic. With the ‘remind, still?’ format most interactions were straightforward: the interviewer asked the question as scripted and the respondent gave a codeable answer. With the ‘remind, changed?’ format it was more likely that interviewers or respondents deviated from behaviours required for standardised interviewing and that the exchange took longer. In Wave 7 the experiment included two further question versions, asking ‘is that still the same or has it changed?’ or ‘has that changed or is it still the same?’ Further analyses will include examining in detail the types of interviewer behaviours and how those related to the reporting of change.