Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

31 sikker på så forstår man hinanden
‘well I will say it is quite alright and it is an advantage to use
English because then you are sure to understand each other’
32 Interv: ja
‘yes’
(1.3)
33 Resp: de[/] det mener jeg ja
’that is what I believe’
The interviewer in this excerpt does not stick to formal standardisation. He mentions a con-
nection between the two questions, even hinting at their opposition. Still, the abstract ques-
tions regarding the respondent’s attitudes are re-contextualised in a way so that they are made
relevant. And, in the newly invented context, both answers make perfect sense. No one would
probably disagree that it is a pragmatic advantage to use whatever language the Nordic spea-
kers commonly understand. This was however not the abstract, de-contextualised attitude the
research team hoped for.
Based on conversational intrusions such as these, both Houtkoop-Stenstra (2000) and
Suchman & Jordan (1986) conclude that the best way to assure true standardisation in survey
interviews, is to allow for interviewers to redesign questions to the actual context they are to
appear in, i.e. interviewers should play an active part in designing questions for the recipient,
and not leave the interpretative work to the respondent in the way that Fowler and Manigione
argues. If interviewers refrain from recipient designing and stick to the questions as they are
phrased, CA argues, they will not improve but rather jeopardise any chance of standardising
intended meaning of the question as opposed to merely its form.
As a follow-up to Suchman and Jordan’s article, experiments have been conducted to
test their proposals for improving interview technique (Schober & Conrad 1997, Conrad &
Schober 2000). These experiments indicate that the reliability of answers (at least in experi-
mental situations) does indeed improve when interviewers are allowed to explain the intention
of the questions rather than just read them aloud. Not surprisingly, this effect is particularly
visible in instances where the respondents’ experiences do not immediately map onto the
phrasing of the question (Schober & Conrad 1997: 595). Schober and Conrad’s experiments
involved respondents answering ‘fact’ questions such as ‘last week, did you have more than
one job’, i.e., questions that presumably have one correct answer but where definitions may
be troublesome; does voluntary work count as a job for example? It would be harder to prove
whether their ‘freer’ interviewing also improve on the quality of interviews regarding langua-
ge attitudes. In these, it is difficult to claim that questions have one true answer.
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