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This article focuses on how do people respond when they are cut off from one of their regular sources of news. In this article it reports reactions of New Yorkers to the newspaper strike of December 1958. The sample used by Bernard Berelson of Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research was broadened to include all five boroughs of New York City plus Long Island and Connecticut suburbs. Interviewing areas were selected to reflect the ethnic and economic characteristics of the metropolitan area. Detailed interviews were accomplished with a total of 164 persons who affirmed that they ordinarily read a New York City daily newspaper regularly. Large-circulation New York newspapers have less "community" flavor than the dailies in most American cities. Local news in New York encompasses a vast scene, remote from most newspaper readers' personal experience. Except for newspapers, the tremendous communications apparatus of the metropolitan area continued to function during the strike. Thus it is remarkable that metropolitan New Yorkers missed the papers as much as they did.

This article shows how a simple graphic tool can assist supervisors to compare very quickly the performance of interviewers, and to discover if any retraining or replacement is necessary to insure improvement in response. The statistical device described is the binomial probability paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an article about an interview with philosophers Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Focus of the interview.

The article reports on newspaper readership studies, and the most common sources of error and confusion. The two sources of confusion are when newspaper readers fail to acknowledge reading an article which they have read; and the opposite case, in which they state having read an article which they have not. Inadequate interviewing technique and 'lack of candor' are reported to occur in newspaper readership studies. Differences in the timing of surveys between weekday newspapers, Sunday newspapers and periodicals are presented.

This paper examines differences in level of educational attainment as reported for the same individuals in two questionnaires administered at approximately a three-year interval. The use of education as a research control variable and major indicator of socioeconomic status needs no amplification. Because of the importance of respondents' educational achievement in surveys and polls, this paper is presented as a contribution to the understanding and possible improvement of interview data reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The survey research interviewer and the job she does should be of particular interest to social scientists. In the first place, the interviewer is the chief collector of the raw data that are used in social analysis. The interviewer's work influences both the quality and the cost of social research. Researcher Herbert Hyman and others of the National Opinion Research Center staff have discussed in detail the effects of interviewers on the interviewing situation. Nevertheless, cost data have not been generally available, though they have become even more necessary as survey costs have risen precipitously over the past two decades, largely due to increases in interviewing costs. Before costs can be reduced, it is necessary to recognize how they originate. This is the first aim of the present paper. Second, the occupational role of the interviewer is of intrinsic interest in itself. Interviewers spend most of their time in the field under very little supervision. In this respect, they are similar to salesmen, social workers and public health nurses. The pay method for interviewers differs from that of the other occupations, since interviewers are paid on an hourly basis while the others work for either a fixed salary or a commission.

In 1965, Warner developed an interviewing procedure designed to eliminate evasive answer bias when questions of a sensitive nature are asked. He called the procedure "randomized response." The authors have been studying the technique for several years and, in this paper, are re- porting some of the estimates of induced abortion in urban North Carolina using randomized response. Estimates of the proportion of women having an abortion during the past year among women 18-44 years of age are reported. For the study population indices were developed relating induced abortion to total conceptions for whites and nonwhites. The illegal abortion rate per 100 conceptions was estimated to be 14.9 for whites and 32.9 for nonwhites. Estimates of the proportion of women having an abortion during their lifetime among women 18 years old or over are also shown, Among ever married women, the proportion having an abortion during their lifetime declined as education increased. Estimates were high for women with 5 or more pregnancies. Most of the respondents stated that they were satisfied that the randomized response approach would not reveal their personal situation. Furthermore, they did not think their friends would truthfully respond to a direct question regarding abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many problems are involved in doing social research on inaccessible nations. In this article, the authors discuss techniques and hazards of using escapees from a nation as a sample of its total population. Refugees from Iron Curtain countries are continually being used as sources of information about these countries and their populations. All investigators who, by force of circumstances, are compelled to interview refugees rather than actual inhabitants of countries in question, naturally approach the task of the analysis and application of results of interviews with some trepidation. The immediate assumption is that refugees must present such a biased sample that projection of their interview results to populations of Iron Curtain countries is an unreasonable procedure. The contention of the present paper, on the contrary, is that under certain circumstances this projection can be made safely. The material to be presented in this article is based upon results of a series of intensive interviews of 300 refugees.

This paper is organized in three parts, corresponding to three presentations. The first part considers a method for studying concept development in the child when it is suspected that fairly regular patterns of advance occur. This method was presented in two earlier papers,' but is here discussed with the modifications necessary for application to more complex concepts. In the second part the cumulative development of a number of interrelated monetary meanings or concepts is traced in considerable detail. In the third part several summary points are made about the character of conceptual development. Sixty-six business class children in Bloomington, Indiana were studied. Five boys and five girls at each age were interviewed, except at the lowest where three of each sex were interviewed. Departure was made from the usual method of isolating scale types. Ordinarily, types are found by placing cutting points wherever there is a shift in scoring weight per item. This procedure, with seventy-one items, would have led to a bewildering array of types. Moreover, various clusters of items were passed almost simultaneously, that is, certain items were about the same order of difficulty. For instance, children who scored between 85 and 89 points passed a number of items which children below 85 points failed.

Previous paper reported a study of questionnaire versus interview methods in a study of human love relationships. This article is concerned with the study of the same methods when categorized questions were employed. Subjects in this investigation were those used in the previous study— sixty-nine college girls who first appeared for a face-to-face interview on their love family relationships and who responded to an anonymous questionnaire, which included some of the same questions that were contained in the interview. Six questions requiring uncategorized responses were included on both the interview and questionnaire presentations. The article concludes that for the purpose of studying love and family relationships of college subjects, the questionnaire method of gathering data seems to be as satisfactory as the interview method and may indeed produce more sell-revelatory information than the interview method. At the same time, the similarity of the data obtained by interview and questionnaire techniques is as conspicuous and important as the obtained differences.

The article discusses a number of problems related to the reader-interest surveys. The author notes that most surveys of this kind consist of an interviewer going into the field and administering a questionnaire. According to the author, an appropriate sample of the population being tested should be constructed, interviewers should be carefully trained to assure reliability and control questions should be included to ensure soundness of data collected. Also noted are problems with the method of interviewers pointing out sections of periodicals to respondents.

Presents a letter to the editor regarding researcher Paul Kurland's comments on the interrelationship of therapy and research instead of a paper on research interviewing in sensitive subject areas.

The article presents information on the research interview and its measurement. Not only is it the most often used tool in social work practice, the interview is also an essential device in social work research. Information can be gathered by this means when no other method is either adequate or possible, yielding richer qualitative data than many other tools and techniques. However, in spite of its important qualities, the interview as a method for collecting original data in research has one major disadvantage: it fails to provide quantitative data for comparison and measurement of interviews. This paper reports attempts to measure a series of forty-eight recorded interviews together with the methods of question formulation and recording development in an attitude study undertaken by the writer in rehabilitation settings in the New York metropolitan area. The study dealt with two groups of individuals with visible and non-visible physical impairments. The primary purpose of the interviews was to collect data about the subjects' attitudes toward their disability. All forty-eight subjects were male adults of various socioeconomic levels, educational backgrounds, and occupations. Each subject had been interviewed by the same interviewer twice prior to the recorded interview to gather biographical data.

This paper describes an adaptation of role playing for the purpose of studying and measuring the performance of caseworkers in the casework interview. This article discusses specifically the content, procedure and rules of the interview, problems of achieving credibility and control of the "client," the reactions of the workers, some types of analysis to which this technique lend itself, and the reliability and validity of the instrument. Interviews were conducted identically for each worker participating in the research and were recorded on tape. Non verbal behavior was recorded by a trained observer. From these records many aspects of the worker's performance were analyzed and the performance of workers in different experimental conditions of the study compared. The performance of the workers was thus measured with greater precision and under conditions of greater control than would have been obtained by observing actual interviews with real recipients, or in examining role playing behavior where the behavior of neither participant was controlled.

Statistically designed sample surveys have enabled pollsters to gauge public opinion on a wide range of issues. In such survey's, selection of a data collection technique is generally based on four criteria: (1) cost; (2) completion time; (3) response rate; and (4) response bias. Typically, more weight is placed on the first three factors and, as a result, adequate attention has not been given to the latter consideration, The study described in this paper looks at one type of response bias--that which results from the use of a specific data collection method. More specifically, this research uses a controlled experimental design in order to determine whether responses given in a public opinion polling are influenced by the method used to collect the data. Three methods are investigated: (1) mall questionnaire; (2) telephone interview; and (3) personal interview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, describes the results of two exploratory studies undertaken by Opinion Research Corp. (ORC) into the public relations problems in interviewing. The first project was completed in 1961 and was concerned with ORC interviewers and their perceptions of the public relations problems confronting them. The second project, completed in April 1963, was concerned with how the interviewing process is regarded by people who agree to be interviewed and people who refuse to be interviewed. Our objective in each phase was to obtain only a broad sense of the situation. The study among the public involved 105 interviews. The sample was drawn from persons who were asked to participate in a nationwide ORC study of attitudes toward the U.S. administration. It was comprised of persons who agreed to be interviewed and persons who refused to be interviewed. What is needed over the long term, however, is a continuing public relations program of broader dimensions. Such an effort should be concerned with publicity and with the development of informational materials to be used in explaining survey research and interviewing.

The article presents a study of the relationships of formal and informal leaders of the voters in Madison, Wisconsin. The purpose of this paper are to compare some of the characteristics of the informal political leaders with those of the respondents, to measure and compare the influence of formal and informal leaders, and to find what kinds of respondents were more influenced by each type of leader. To obtain needed information about the informal leaders named by the respondents, it was necessary to interview a sample of these leaders. To make the data for formal and informal leaders more comparable, the frequency distributions of the first three issues were put into two multiple contingency tables, one for respondents who voted Democratic, another for respondents who voted Republican, in the 1950 elections in Madison. Opinions of respondents and leaders were quantified by the discriminant function technique. Correlation ratios between the initial opinions of respondents and the opinions they ascribed to their leaders were then of the order .7, positive and statistically significant, for both formal and informal leaders. These results imply a considerable amount of agreement between the respondents and their leaders, whether the latter were the most respected persons among themselves or prominent political figures.

The article focuses on sex effects in the interviewing of young adults. Although periodic assessments of the perils of using an interview format to collect data have been made, many social scientists feel that the advantages of the interview outweigh its disadvantages in a wide variety of research situations. Incumbent on those who utilize the interview, however, are the responsibilities of identifying the situations where problems in measurement could occur in the interview, as well as ascertaining the extent of these problems should they occur. The focus of this paper is on the first of these responsibilities-identifying situations where measurement problems can arise due to the effect, in this case, of the interviewer on the subjects' responses. In a number of previous studies interviewer effects have been shown to be related to ascriptive characteristics of the interviewer such as age, sex, and race, as well as to somewhat less apparent traits including the interviewer's social class, his own attitudes about the interview items, and his psychological temperament for the interviewer's role. Other researchers have approached the problem of interview validity from a different angle by trying to identify which types of questions were most susceptible to interview effects.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the Hollingshead Index of Social Position (I.S.P.) is correlated with class awareness and class identification, two principal components of class consciousness. Comparative data are introduced from the Hollingshead and Redlich (1958) community study of New Haven, Connecticut, and an investigation by this writer (1963) of an urban Pennsylvania community, hereafter referred to as Twin City. Both studies use an objective index (I.S.P.) to estimate positions individuals occupy in the status structure of the community, and both correlate class awareness and class identification with class placement by this index. The interviews for the present study were conducted in a middle-sized Pennsylvania city, with a population of approximately 75,000, in the summer of 1961. The number of completed interview schedules, from which data analyses were derived, was set at 1,811. The social position which individuals and families occupy in the Twin City status structure was determined according to the modification of Hollingshead's three-factor I.S.P. All of the sample households enumerated in the interview schedule were stratified by class through use of this index. The collected data used to determine the I.S.P. for each household consisted of the education and occupation of the head of the household plus the ecological location of the dwelling unit in which the respondent resided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No research results are any better than the quality of the data. As scientists, survey researchers must share the problems of measuring, understanding, and controlling bias in their data. The potential sources of bias in survey research are many and varied. They may appear at any one or all of the several stages of the data gathering process. For example, they may occur in the selection of the sample, in the development of measuring instruments, in securing the responses of the persons in the sample, in the respondents replies, in the recording of the responses, and in processing the recorded responses. Even beyond the data collection process, bias may occur, as in the misapplication of statistics and in the interpretation of data. Progress has been made toward identifying and controlling sources of bias in some of these stages of the research process. Perhaps most progress has been made in the sampling stage and in the statistical application stage. Much advance has been made also in the reduction of error at the instrumentation stage. However, considerable work remains to be done on the problems of error control, especially biasing error, at all stages of the research between instrumentation and statistical analysis. This includes getting full response from the sample, accurate answers to the questions asked, and accurate recording and processing of responses. The accumulation of bias from these and other possible sources may be referred to as total or aggregate bias. The total bias may then be divided for analytical purposes into the following types: (1) sampling bias, (2) instrumentation bias, (3) non-response bias, (4) respondent bias, (5) interviewer bias, and (6) processing bias. This paper is an effort to deal with the problem of respondent bias in survey research. That respondent bias is a potent force in diminishing the validity and reliability of results from survey research is well recognized. The recognition of this condition has led to an enormous amount of activity aimed at isolating factors which determine this weakness of research results. These studies, by and large, have dealt with the problem of determining the direction of respondent bias, its magnitude, the speearle variables which produce respondent bias, and the effect of such bias on research results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper embodies the findings of a field study made of communication of modern ideas and knowledge into some Indian villages. The diffusion into seven villages of the following modern ideas and kinds of knowledge was studied. The intellectual perspective of the villages makes for greater communicability of certain items. Both intranational and international items of communication were analyzed. Limited as the sample of each of these was, however, they brought out the relative predominance of knowledge of local over world events. Interviewing and observation were the main tools. The schedule containing the questions had sometimes to be kept in the background. Experience in the villages proves that greater information can be obtained by informal chats and discussions than by asking straight questions. Questions had to be mixed with a good deal of other conversation. Certain broad conclusions emerge from the study. As is revealed by the scalogram, it is not merely the distance from or nearness to the city that facilitates communication of ideas and knowledge. The social structure also determines the qualitative and quantitative content of the communications that are assimilated.

In the summer of 1952 the "Public Opinion Quarterly" carried the author's article on "Interviewer Training in Another Culture." Since then he has trained interviewers for surveys on the social and psychological factors affecting human fertility of lower class groups in Puerto Rico and Jamaica. In this article, he describes some of the techniques used and evaluates the effectiveness of these devices. The present paper draws together the experiences of the recruitment and training processes in Jamaica and Puerto Rico. Surveys of attitudes toward birth control and fertility in the underdeveloped area pose several problems for the interviewer trainer such as locating and screening of competent candidates, motivating them to perform arduous interviewing duties on a subject which might be considered indelicate or even distasteful, techniques by which interviewing skills can best be communicated in individuals of another culture. It is possible that the extensive training given contributes more to building up motivation and morale than in the development of training skills themselves.

A number of techniques have been suggested for determining the merit of a given method of questioning by several social scientists. Apparently with few exceptions the techniques and suggestions can be abstracted to a general principle. Merit is reflected in the extent of agreement between the response to a question and some behavior on the part of the respondent. The emphasis has been on a relation between the response and the respondent. The present paper suggests that there may be another concern in establishing the merit of a method of questioning. The value of any set of questions may be based upon relations with the questioner rather than with the questionee. A final test for any question may become, does the response, as obtained in this form, lead to information for the questioner which is not biased by the method of questioning. A pattern of questioning is initiated when one or more persons requires information upon which partially to base decisions. Information may be obtained through many channels of communication, including verbal and written questioning.

The carrying out of surveys across language barriers raises several problems related to translation and the use of bilingual personnel, and intensifies the necessity of considering carefully the ability of procedures and the validity of results. This paper attempts to present a preliminary systematization of some of language problems which arise in the conduct of international surveys, i.e., in surveys designed in one country for accomplishment in another. While many of these problems are hardly new, and while solutions have, in some cases, already been proposed, the great variety of such proposed solutions suggests that they have been based on differing underlying assumptions, these, no doubt, should be made explicit. The almost complete lack of formal intercommunication about these matters is probably another major cause of the variety of procedures and the lack of explicitness of underlying assumptions. The focus is on interviewing and written questionnaire studies, where problems of schedule translations occur and of communication between members of the research team. These problems, of course, are not unique to survey studies, any treatment of translation also applies to such endeavors as the content analysis of foreign language communication materials.

The quality of a poll/sample survey, specially one which is the final analysis, which determines the effectiveness of the polling organization, depends upon the quality of its interviewer personnel. The interviewer problem is the most typical in entire survey conducting process, as it deals with the difficulties involved in measuring and correcting human aptitudes as well as the physical distance problems between the surveyors and the persons observing and training them. This paper describes the methods of interviewer selection, training, and evaluation. It is assumed that good results are those, which have two qualities--the least number of refusals and the least number of technical errors. After a survey has been completed, a chart of the errors most frequently committed by all the interviewers, considered together, is made called the "Observation Chart". The interviewers mistake is given a mark or weight. For each interviewer, the sum of the weights is added, and the total is divided by the number of persons interviewed. This technique gives each interviewer a chance to judge his own work and compare the quality of his own results relative to those obtained by the other interviewers.

A study of public opinion research literature reveals that until recently there has been comparatively little concern with theoretical problems. For example, there have been few attempts to formulate hypothesis regarding the dynamics underlying answers of respondents to poll questions, or to conceptualize the obtained results in terms of any systematic social psychological theory. The concern with the technical problems of sampling, interviewing, and the formulation of poll questions, quite properly perhaps, seems to have precluded an interest in theory. It is even difficult to find a formal definition of the term "public," or a description of conditions under which a public opinion is formed. In several recent papers, a different emphasis has appeared. There is explicit or implicit recognition that there are organizing factors in opinion, and that a public opinion expressed in terms of percentages of responses from individuals who have only one factor in common, namely that have been asked a question by an interviewer, may have very limited meaning.

The article presents three research papers, published in Living Research of March 1, 1948 issue of the journal "Public Opinion Quarterly." The first paper reports a survey conducted in the year 1946 in which 5,984 adults were interviewed regarding their opinions and information about the atomic bomb and world affairs. A general information and a conservatism-radicalism scale were constructed on basis responses obtained in this survey. These scales made it possible to divide respondents into five groups according to the degree to which they were informed, and each of these groups in turn was broken down into radical, indeterminate and conservative sub-groups. The second paper presents a survey of attitudes of a representative sample of medical interns in selected hospitals throughout the U.S. to prove that analysts could go far wrong if they accepted replies to the open question at face value. Long hours appear merely to be a stereotyped complaint which has little real relationship to the attitude of doctors toward their work.

The paper explores how fathers perceive the economic costs and benefits of raising children and how these perceptions influence preferred number of children and contraceptive use. Interviews were conducted for this study in 1969 with an island-wide sample of 2200 Taiwanese husbands. Analysis indicates that a complex of cost and benefit considerations has an appreciable net effect on reproductive attitudes and behaviour, after socio-economic status and demographic characteristics have been taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a study on social grading by manual workers. This paper reports a small research project in East London in England wherein the sample consisted mainly of manual workers. Personal interviews were used rather than written questionnaires. After they had graded occupations, people were asked the reasons for their decisions. The small research project described here was an attempt to find out whether manual workers chosen at random from electoral registers. This East London inquiry finds a considerable measure of dissensus amongst the manual workers in its sample. The respondents are divided into two groups. The deviants grade occupations according to their social contribution. Manual workers are on the whole ranked above non-manual. The deviants are influenced by their political attitudes. In conclusion, it was on a very small scale, and a much larger sample is plainly required. It was made in East London, and the residents in it may not be at all representative of manual workers in general. The validity of the findings can only be tested by a full-scale inquiry. A full-scale inquiry into the views of a cross-section of the population using verbal interviews could reveal the measure of dissensus consensus on the status of occupations, and beyond that, lay the foundations for a study of an important aspect of political ideology in contemporary Britain.

The article presents the paper is based on five years of field work carried on by undergraduates at Wellesley College, Massacheusets, in connection with a course on American ethnic groups, though use will be made only of the results obtained. The students came in contact with some two or three hundred Armenian-Americans, chiefly of the first and second generation, living in the Boston metropolitan area. Interviews were of some length, ranging from one to five hours. They were chiefly group interviews, with their setting a little more frequently in the home than in the office. For the purpose of qualitative analysis, the home interviews were particularly enlightening, involving as they did informal family interaction around the dinner table. The informants for this study were chosen largely from that section of the ethnic group which has made a more or less successful adjustment to middle class status. Since the interviewers were inexperienced, it seemed best to give them their initial training in informal interviewing and participant observation under conditions which would tax their emerging skill as lightly as possible.

The article reports on a marketing study methodology for listing, balloting and tracking results which is reportedly preferable to checklists. The downside to mail survey or interview checklists is stated to be fatigue and the results may become skewed towards the most popular choice. A different method is presented in which respondents are presented with cards and asked to order them in correspondence with three options: prefer, avoid, or indifferent. This method is adaptable to many surveys; the article uses an example of literature genre, in which respondents select their reaction to a certain type of book.

The article discusses the use of group interviewing as a marketing research tool. In 1951 a study was conducted to test the effectiveness of the practice. Personal interviews were utilized in the study. Group interviewing was found to conserve both time and money as compared with mailed questionnaires. It was also seen as a more effective way to standardize controls. Group interviews appeared to decrease interviewer bias. Overall the group interviewing tactic proved successful according to researchers.

Study of the various papers on social work interviews shows that their writers have had in mind two fairly distinct purposes. Some have aimed quite directly at the improvement of case work technique, while others have undertaken primarily an analysis of the interview as a bit of social interaction. The majority have clearly been concerned with the technology rather than with the sociology of interviews. Yet it is a curious fact that the Minneapolis-St. Paul group, whose immediate objective is frankly improved teaching of how to interview clients, has made one of the most significant contributions to the analysis of interviews. A comparison with the work of the Kansas City group may be of interest. It has been concerned primarily in studying the interview as a type of social interaction, but so far has failed to discover any means of generalizing its data. It took the interview apart and identified certain constituent elements, but it did not succeed in producing a set of concepts by means of which to describe and lable recurring processes. Some people do not think that the Twin-City group has been altogether successful either, but it has pointed the way. Its attempt to classify phases of the interview as techniques, processes and purposes is quite significant and the effort to find suitable names for these also deserves credit.

This paper is of important to sociologists in two respects. These are: first, it has emphasized the non-verbal gestures more than any previous study and has more successfully abstracted them from the rest of the interaction and from the situation so that their significance can be appreciated. Second, it is a completely descriptive account from which interpretations, appraisals, and classifications have been eliminated as completely as possible. Two questions may be raised by sociologists in regard to the technique used in this investigation: First, whether the description of non-verbal gestures adequate or not. It is clearly impractical to include a description of every gesture of every observable part of the organism for each moment of the interview. Second, whether it conform to the requirements of scientific method or not. Whether it is possible to abstract a brief incident or episode from the rest of the lives of the participants and describe it so that it will yield significant results.

The article presents that the public's increasing familiarity with opinion surveys has had its blessings. Interviewers today can feel reasonably confident that a prospective respondent understands what is expected of him when he opens the door and is told he is taking a survey. Now that interviewers have just about reached the point where they can dispense with lengthy explanations, however, a new impediment has arisen. Utilizing the fact that the public knows about and accepts opinion surveys, some salesmen have found this approach a convenient lever to pry open the reluctant door. As a result, many otherwise receptive respondents have begun to look with unkind suspicion on anyone who rings the doorbell and starts talking about a survey. Apparently the survey technique geared to almost any product. One interviewer doing a survey of vital status asked all about deaths in the family and places of burial. Another statistically-minded salesman wanted to know about the number of children in the family and their ages.

Formal role responsibilities of the family planning outreach worker include a number of nebulous terms such as "help," "aid," and "assist." Though some duties included in these responsibilities are highly specific (e.g. taking blood pressure), the nature of the organizational task (convincing clients to accept and use family planning methods) and the locale in which much of the work is performed (outside the boundaries of the organization) makes the role highly amenable to the peculiarities of the worker's personality. Interviews with ten outreach workers in two family planning clinics revealed five informal adaptations of the role used by varying numbers of the workers -- social distance mediator, community supplier and bargainer, political and social debater, confidant and friend, and comic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent attempts to develop symbolic interactionist methodologies have sought to treat the interview as an object of sociological enquiry as well as a research instrument. But their accounts in terms of interactional rules and presentation of selves are primarily concerned with reactions to interviews, and the display of the interview setting in talk is treated as a resource rather than as a topic for investigation. Since such a reliance on the availability of phenomena is also a feature of the `natural attitude', lay and sociological usages of the interview share striking similarities. More specifically, both employ the documentary method of interpretation and, in order to claim a correspondence between theft accounts and some external reality, use remedies to counter misunderstandings. On the basis of tapes of selection interviews, the paper examines the competences and policies routinely adopted to provide for the contexting of talk as interview talk. Given that talk serves to display its setting (this is its reflexive character), talk becomes interview talk as members' managed accomplishment of a knowable context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes certain quota sampling procedures and attempts to show that they are very close to traditional probability sampling. Quotas are shown to depend on availability for interviewing and evidence is presented to show that sex, age, and employment status are reasonable predictors of availability. Quota sampling methods are not unbiased but data are presented which suggest that the bias is generally of the order of 3 to 5 per cent. It is shown, however, that the cost differentials between these quota samples and call-back samples are small. The major advantage of this new procedure may well be the speed with which interviewing may be completed during crises such as the Kennedy assassination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For various reasons individuals in a sample survey may prefer not to confide to the interviewer the correct answers to certain questions. In such cases the individuals may elect not to reply at all or to reply with incorrect answers. The resulting evasive answer bias is ordinarily difficult to assess. In this paper it is argued that such bias is potentially removable through allowing the interviewee to maintain privacy through the device of randomizing his response. A randomized response method for estimating a population proportion is presented as an example. Unbiased maximum likelihood estimates are obtained and their mean square errors are compared with the mean square errors of conventional estimates under various assumptions about the underlying population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study which was undertaken to determine whether the advantages of the standardized interview in terms of the reliability of the data obtained are sufficient to warrant its use in research studies concerned with family behavior. Traditionally, in studies concerned with family behavior which have not purported intensive personality analyses, three general approaches have been utilized in the collection of data: i.e., questionnaires, interviews, and observation. For the purposes of obtaining relatively impersonal information, the questionnaire method yields data of sufficient reliability to warrant its use; however, there is little empirical evidence concerning the relationship between the method of data collection and the reliability of responses obtained in studies of family behavior. The interview has been uncritically accepted as a "perfect instrument" while the reliability and validity of paper-and-pencil tests have been critically checked. It is surprising that very few studies have been performed to find out the best method for obtaining reliable information.

The article discusses the difficulties encountered by the social workers while field interviewing of problem drinkers. Specific problems such as ones related to intoxication, misrepresentation of facts, and mental ill health are discussed. There is a pervasive belief that problem drinkers constitute an especially difficult group to relate to for treatment or social welfare purposes. This belief was carried over as relevant to problems in the interviewing of problem drinkers for research purposes in the field. Prior to the interview, following questions had to be answered: Is the drinker well enough to be interviewed? If he were in treatment, would the interview upset him and influence adversely his ongoing therapy? The respondent's misrepresentation of facts was a paramount problem throughout the interviewing. Some distortions were obvious, such as reporting of abstinence despite a liquor-breath; and some were subtle, such as contradictory statements about facts between and during the first, second, and third interviews.

The article discusses that an increasingly common target of much social research has been the aged segment of the population. A recent study of an extremely aged population provided an opportunity to direct attention to two critical considerations in the conduct of surveys among the aged--the attainment of cooperation and good rapport with the sampled respondents and the effect upon the interview situation of respondent and interviewer characteristics. The field work was undertaken with some trepidation and no notion of what might be expected in the way of cooperation from a study group whose youngest members would be in the late seventies. Allowance had been made for the possibility that large numbers of respondents would be too infirm to cooperate: in those cases, interviews would be sought with informants who were knowledgeable about the respondent's situation. Much to the surprise of the study team it was necessary to seek out informants in only 12 per cent of the cases. Finally, any concern with the kind of cooperation the interviewers would encounter quickly dissipated when the Spancos began to welcome the interviewers (almost all of whom were women) figuratively and, in a few cases, literally, with open arms.

Presents several comments on public opinion related to interviews published in the 2001 issue of the journal 'Public Opinion Quarterly.' Opinion the interviewer biasing effects associated both with the race of the interviewer; Comment on the role of interviewers; Verification on the use of interviewers topics.

The article presents information on bias in an interview. There is some evidence that bias is likely to occur in the interview when there is social distance between interviewer and respondent. Status distance and threatening questions may create a situation in which the respondent feels pressure to answer in the direction he believes will conform to the opinions or expectations of the interviewer. This encourages the respondent to avoid the possible negative consequences of answering a question the "wrong" way. It seems likely that the role performance of the interviewer could either enhance or mitigate the biasing effects of status characteristics and potentially threatening questions. It has been suggested, for example, that the interviewer may be able to "alter the respondent's perception of the situation." Two major role-performance characteristics have received extensive discussion in this respect. First, it has been suggested that the interviewer should be able to establish good rapport. By doing so he will be able to minimize or dispel the respondent's fears of the possible negative consequences of his answers. On the other hand, rapport may also produce a strain toward consensus on the subject matter of the interview schedule. If the respondent is attracted to the interviewer, he may attempt to answer questions in agreement with his perception of the interviewer's opinion in order to maintain or even increase the reward value of the interaction.

A little-discussed but often-used technique in survey research is the retrospective question. The retrospective question is described by Patricia Kendall and Paul F. Lazarsfeld as, asking the respondents to recall what their attitudes were at some earlier period, one attempts to reconstruct what would have been observed had there been a previous interview. The writers also point to some possible objections to the retrospective question. Namely, responses may be inaccurate and attitudes and events may be remembered selectively. Also, there is the question of specifying time. Failure to demonstrate a relationship between subjective and actual change may therefore be a result of not permitting respondents either sufficient range of response categories or sufficient range of subject matter in which to reflect change. In any event, for the available tests of the retrospective question, there is evidence that this measure of change correlates with attitude change as measured by the panel technique. The direction of change among "attitude changers" is reflected in their own reports of their changes in attitude.

This article presents a case history regarding measuring the effectiveness of an overseas information campaign which was designed to permit comparison of the attitudes of a cross- section of adults in Salonica, Greece, who were interviewed after the advertisements ran in the press. To overcome any possible "panel effect," the second wave of interviews was conducted not only with the same people who had been in the original sample, but also with another parallel cross-section of the population, a sample whose members had not been interviewed previously. Changes in opinion between the first and second survey periods might have occurred quite independently of the advertising campaign, through the impact of world events or of political developments in Greece. For example, attitudes toward the United States might have become more favorable between the first and second wave of the study because of a general improvement in opinion throughout the country rather than as a result of the advertisement campaign. Opinion might have remained above the same in Salonica, while it became less favorable elsewhere in Greece.

The interplay between professionals and clients has been examined in a number of settings and the impact of laymen on professional behavior is well-known to the sociologists. In this research report these insights are applied to police-citizen interaction in an effort to explain the dynamics of discretionary decisions by police officers and the role such discretion plays in their quest to attain higher professional stature. Specific attention will be paid to variations in the willingness of policemen to develop and utilize informers or "stool pigeons." This article examines information secured in tape-recorded personal interviews conducted during the winter of 1971 by the author in two European police departments. Discretionary decisions to arrest or not, or to press serious or minor charges, become one part of the negotiation between policemen and citizens, making it possible for the police to carve out a work style balancing professional rules and codes while also making sufficient concessions to client controls necessary to operate in the streets.

The article presents information on an experiment in the measurement of business motivation. One approach to measuring business objectives or motives as a third variable might be, to ask business managers what their objectives are. In essence, this is what has been done in many interview or questionnaire studies. Such a simple, direct approach has both advantages and disadvantages. Serious disadvantages of the questionnaire-interview approach are that the samples are usually limited and biased and the respondents may answer what they consider proper or what they think the answer should be rather than what the actual facts are. In an attempt to circumvent some of these difficulties, an alternative approach to the identification and measurement of business motivations and objectives is proposed and tested in this paper. In essence, the proposal is to treat data from business income statements and balance sheets much as though they were scores obtained from psychometric tests to which factor or principal component analyses can be applied. An underlying assumption is that business policy objectives are revealed by the particular way in which the different income and balance sheet variables are juxtaposed. It must be admitted, of course, that methods of psychological measurement and testing are not without difficulties, even when applied to data obtained under controlled circumstances. Still, experimentation with new techniques of measurement might be justified, if only for reasons of intellectual curiosity.

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