Conferences

Researchers are invited to submit proposals for papers at the session “Interviewers as Agents of Data Collection” at the European Survey Research Association conference, June, 29 – July, 3 2009 in Warsaw. In interviewer-mediated surveys interviewers naturally have great potential to affect both data quality and survey costs. Interviewers make contact and gain cooperation with the sample unit; they act as mediators between the researcher’s questions and the respondent’s answers; their characteristics, attitudes and abilities can affect the answers recorded in the data. As such they are invaluable and a source of error at the same time.

Papers in this session will focus on the role of interviewers in data collection. Topics might include issues such as interviewer recruitment; briefing, training and shadowing; remuneration (incl. incentives and career progression); interviewer workloads; interviewer management systems and quality monitoring; interviewer behaviour (e.g. contact and refusal aversion/conversion procedures); interviewer effects on data; interviewer issues in cross-national and multi-lingual surveys.

Proposals should be no more than 500 words in length.