Abstract
J.L. Esposito and J. Hess (1992) "The
Use of Interviewer Debriefings to Identify Problematic Questions
on Alternate Questionnaires," Paper presented at the Annual
Meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion
Researchers, St. Petersburg, FL.
Interviewers are in a unique position to evaluate the
merits of survey questions. Not only do they obtain very
useful feedback from respondents in the course of
administering questionnaires, more experienced interviewers
can often draw on their accumulated knowledge of survey
interactions to identify—during the pretesting stage of
questionnaire development—questions that are likely to be
difficult for interviewers to read and/or for respondents to
comprehend. In this paper, we discuss our experiences with
interviewer debriefings (i.e., focus groups, structured
questionnaires) as one of four general methodologies used in
a field test of alternative versions of a major economic
survey.
The paper is organized as follows. In the introductory
section, we review methodological research in the area of
questionnaire pretesting that has made use of interviewer
debriefings. In the second section of the paper, we describe
our experiences with the interviewer-debriefing methodology.
The context for this discussion, as alluded to above, is the
work that was done by a team of researchers in evaluating
alternative versions of questions for the Current Population
Survey (CPS). In the final section, we conclude with a
general discussion of this method's utility, identifying what
we believe are its strong points and limitations under
various pretesting/contextual conditions. We also propose a
new, composite debriefing technique—one that combines the
use of focus groups and a structured debriefing
questionnaire—that addressess some of the recent criticism
of interviewer debriefings as a pretesting methodology.
To receive a copy of this paper (usually within 3-5 days), please contact Jim Esposito by phone or voice mail (202-691-6368), by e-mail (Esposito.Jim@bls.gov), or by mailing your request to:
James L. Esposito
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Postal Square Building, Room 4985
2 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E.
Washington, DC, 20212
Last Modified Date: July 19, 2008
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Bureau of Labor Statistics
