Asking to Speak to Another: A Skill for Soliciting Survey Participation

Abstract

This article is in the vein of applied conversation analysis, dealing with a problem of declining participation rates for survey interviews. When calling a household to request participation in a survey, interviewers may ask for a preselected “sample person.” We first explore how interviewers design this request in a more or less presumptive way, depending on how and when they identify themselves. Secondly, we analyze different linguistic structures that embody degrees of entitlement. Thirdly, we examine greeting items for their degree of ceremoniousness and in terms of what work they do when not part of an explicit greeting sequence. We examine other features of asking to speak to another as well, including “please” and references to the sample person. Our strategy for analyzing survey interview data is to explore the design of “switchboard” requests in ordinary telephone calls. We relate our analysis to previous research that addresses whether the detailed practices for asking to speak to another matter for obtaining consent to do an interview. We draw implications for obtaining participation in the survey interview and other kinds of phone call solicitations. Data are in American English.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dana Garbarski and Jason Nolen for research assistance and to Jeremy Freese, Nora Cate Schaeffer, and the anonymous ROLSI reviewers and editor for feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹Regarding criterion c: Along with this article's first author and Professor Jeremy Freese of Northwestern University, a coinvestigator on the project was Professor Nora Cate Schaeffer, who serves as the Director of the University of Wisconsin Survey Center.

²At the time of the Maynard et al. (2010) study, the subsample was 400. As more resources became available, that subsample was increased to 506, as reported in Schaeffer et al. (2013).

³Pseudonyms were used throughout the transcripts for the names of sample persons, their former high schools, and the cities in which these schools were or are located. Data were digitally audio recorded with the post hoc consent of participants (i.e., permission for the recording was asked for and granted after the survey introduction and before the questionnaire itself commenced), in accord with protocols approved by the University of Wisconsin Social and Behavioral Sciences Internal Review Board.

⁴Three collections are audio recordings commonly used by conversation analysts and the accompanying transcripts (totaling 60 calls with switchboard requests): NB (in which the speakers are American) contributed one case, while the British collections Holt (17) and Rahman (12) yielded a total of 29. A fourth collection (eight calls) is labeled HC and contains calls recorded in the home of a student for a university class taught by the first author. A fifth collection of 22 is from the University of Texas Conversation Library (UTCL) and are calls recorded in a home in which the husband, “Hank Smalley,” has an office where he often works as a real estate agent, although he also has an outside office. This collection includes 11 that are regular (nonbusiness) telephone calls with switchboard requests and 11 that involve business contacts mostly related to Hank's real estate profession, although there are two calls involving Hank or his wife, “Cora Smalley,” calling other businesses for particular services (e.g., house cleaning). Because those that are related to Hank's business involve Hank or Cora answering the phone with a usual “Hello” type of response rather than the name of the business, these call openings initially are not distinguishable from more regular calls, and we include them, along with a small number of business-type calls in the Holt collection, as having “ordinary” type openings. (The UTCL collection was assembled by the late Robert Hopper, Professor of Communications at the University of Texas.)

⁵Not only are WLS call participants strangers to one another, but also the interviewers are acting in their occupational capacities or institutional roles to solicit participation from individuals who were 1957 Wisconsin high school graduates. That is, there is a specific social action that characterizes the WLS telephone inquiries (Maynard et al., 2010), differentiating them from more ordinary calls. Previous research (Maynard & Schaeffer, 1997, 2002) has found that survey interviews, as compared with ordinary calls, and in line with Schegloff's (1986, p. 141) suggestion that “how are you” and greetings are not relevant in particular types of business calls, contain only two of the four core opening sequences (cf. Whalen & Zimmerman, 1987).

⁶See the Whalen, Whalen, and Henderson (2003) study of a teleservice center and the ways that representatives handle telephone service calls while navigating through computer screens and handling documents and other objects at their workstations.

⁷Of course, exchanges in which the caller does not self-identify and is oriented to obtaining a targeted recipient can at least briefly be transformed into something more personal (Frankel, 1977, p. 104): A: HelloB: Hello, can I speak t'Terry please, A: Oh hi John,=how's your mom feeling? B: Much better thanks= A: =Good well send her my regards. (0.2) Hang on an I'll get Terry.

⁸Extract 6 is one of the three cases in the 105 transcribed calls in which the interviewer does not provide component (B), personal self-identification. In no cases does an interviewer omit some form of institutional affiliation, which suggests that the crucial component of the (a) personal + (b) institutional identification turn is the latter (b) part rather than the former (a), possibly because it is informative about the purpose of the call, whereas the personal name is not.

⁹Correspondingly, interviewers identified themselves by first name–last name in about 67% of the calls, by first name only in 30%, and institutionally (the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study) about 4% of the time.

¹⁰See also Pillet-Shore's (2008, p. 100, fn. 33) discussion of “hey” as a casual greeting.

¹¹All five of the switchboard requests in which the answerer is a child also has a caller who is the child's aunt or other close relative. The calls are from what is known as the Rahman corpus, and here is an example: R:B:1:VMJ:10 Matt: Hello Redcah five o'six one?, Vera: Hello Mathew is yer mum the:re love. Matt: Yeh,h MUM?, It may be that the use of the turn-initial greeting object along with an endearment term at utterance end embody a kind of detachment (formal “hello”) and attachment (“love”) that mark aunt–child relationships (cf. Radcliffe-Brown, 1949). However, this is speculation and would need a wider and more representative set of data to verify.

¹²For an instance of a single-greeting in a face-to-face episode, see Pillet-Shore (2008, pp. 81–84); in this instance, it is coordinated with self-introductions by two parties in the midst of a four-party interaction and “gaze dance” between the two.

¹³When the answerer is not the sample person (and turns out to be an intermediary), it may be that the interviewer's ways of asking for that person are a marker of other facets of the interviewer's strategies for getting to the ultimate request to participate, particularly the manner of greeting and introducing her/himself to the sample person when that person comes on the line.

¹⁴On polite and impolite declinations of requests to participate in the survey interview, see Maynard and Schaeffer (1997).