The association between the interviewers’ and the respondents’ political attitudes in a telephone survey

ABSTRACT

Interviewer effects in telephone surveys on political topics are likely to occur. The literature has yielded considerable evidence about the impact of basic interviewer characteristics, but research is lacking on how interviewers’ beliefs may shape responses. This study is aimed at assessing the association between the interviewers’ party affiliation and political ideology and the answers provided to the same questions by the respondents, using a large-scale telephone survey conducted in Hungary. The results show that interviewers account for a relatively large amount of variance, especially in the models predicting item-nonresponse. The interviewer’s reluctance to answer these questions strongly predicted missing data on the respondent level. On the other hand, only weak interviewer effects were found regarding the valid, substantive responses. The results demonstrate how, for instance, estimations of nonrespondents’ party preferences in electoral polls may be biased due to interviewer-related errors, and highlight the need for standardized persuasion strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Interviewer
• telephone survey
• election poll
• measurement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2023.2292500

Notes

1. Kish (1962) investigating F2F data found that even factual questions (e.g. marital status) can be biased by the interviewers.

2. See details about the institute here: https://szazadveg.hu/en/foundation/mission-statement

3. Unfortunately, due to a request and legal concerns of the customer who ordered other parts of the survey, the call recordings were destroyed after the interviews. As a result, the recordings were not available for analysis in this study.

4. A 16 percent response rate is common in the Hungarian context. Low and decreasing response rates are a major concern for telephone survey researchers in Hungary, similarly to other countries in Europe. However, in Hungary, there is a lack of definitive evidence regarding the potential nonresponse bias and negative impact on estimates resulting from low response rates.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ádám Stefkovics

Ádám Stefkovics is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences and Századvég Foundation in Budapest and a visiting researcher at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University. His main interests are political sociology and survey methodology.