Interviewer Behavior and Interviewer Characteristics in PIAAC Germany

Interviewers are the first in line when it comes to data collection. Therefore, it is important that they perform their tasks diligently, so that the data they collect are comparable and that errors are minimized. This paper analyzes how interviewers conducted interviews for the Programme for the In...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMethoden, daten, analysen Vol. 8; no. 2; pp. 199 - 222
Main Authors Daniela Ackermann-Piek, Natascha Massing
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim 01.01.2014
Subjects
data quality
interviewer behaviour
interviewer characteristics
interviewer survey
PIAAC Germany
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Summary:Interviewers are the first in line when it comes to data collection. Therefore, it is important that they perform their tasks diligently, so that the data they collect are comparable and that errors are minimized. This paper analyzes how interviewers conducted interviews for the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and which kinds of mistakes they made. We approached these questions with audio interview recordings collected during the fieldwork of PIAAC in Germany (carried out in 2011/2012), as well as with an interviewer survey conducted with the German PIAAC interviewers. First, we introduce the data and the coding scheme used to evaluate interviewers’ behavior with audio recordings. Subsequently, we describe the interviewers’ actual behavior with regard to standardized interviewing techniques and investigate whether interviewer characteristics are associated with data quality. Our results demonstrate that interviewers do deviate from the expected behavior in all the aspects we examined. However, we identified only few associations with interviewers’ background characteristics.
ISSN:1864-6956
2190-4936
DOI:10.12758/mda.2014.008