Interview Effects

The final source of potential innacuracy in public opinion polling that we'll consider in this course is the administration of a poll -- that is, the manner in which a questionnaire is presented to respondents and their answers are recorded.

Self-Administered Polls

Self-administered entail respondents reading the questionnaire on their own and recording their own answers. Online polls are a good example of self-administered polls, as are polls completed via snail mail and the teaching evaluations you fill out at the end of each course at ISU.

The major "pro" of self-administered polling should be fairly obvious in light of what you've already learned about respondent insincerity: A pollster can generally expect more honesty from respondents when they don't have to share their answers out loud with another person whom they fear might make judgements about thier beliefs and behaviors. There are some downsides as well, though. For example, self-administered polls (especially mail-in polls) tend to have a lower response rate than polls that are administered by an interviewer (see below). In addition, open-ended questions, or questions that ask respondents to articulate answers in their own words rather than choose them off a multiple choice list, are less likely to be answered -- let alone answered at length -- in self-administered polls. This limits the amount of information that can be gathered from public opinion polls and also makes it harder to discern when respondents are offering nonattitudes rather than actually-held opinions.

Interviewer-Administered Polls

In contrast to self-administered polls, interviewer-administered polls make use of a "middle-man" who reads the questionnaire to respondents and records answers on their behalf. Telephone polls (which are a very efficient way to conduct a large-scale poll, and so are very commonly used in the polling industry) are are the most typical form of interviewer-administered polls, but there are also in-person polls (which was the "state of the art" back in polling's early days) in which the interviewer and respondent interact face-to-face.

The pro's and con's of interviewer-administered polling are basically the flip-side of self-administered polling. On the one hand, it heightens the likelihood of insincerity; on the other, it improves response rates and enables pollsters to gather more extensive information through open-ended questions. Well-trained interviewers can also help clarify when respondents are confused about a question's wording or response alternatives.

Trait of Interviewer Effects

A lot of public opinion research focuses on a polling administration problem that emerges only in interviewer-administered polls: trait of interviewer effects, or biased results due to the interviewer's personal characteristics, including especially their race and gender. Trait of interviewer effects are the topic of the last required text for this unit, a video interview with CBS Deputy Director of Surveys Sarah Dutton at last summer's AAPOR conference about race and gender of interviewer effects in the 2008 primaries: