Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Structured Interviewing I: Questionnaires 253
tions and then let the computer do the dialing. Interviewers sit at their computers,
wearing telephone headsets, and when a respondent agrees to be interviewed,
they read the questions from the screen. With the kind of fixed-choice
questions that are typical in surveys, interviewers only have to click a box on
the screen to put in the respondent’s answer to each question. For open-ended
questions, respondents talk and the interviewer types in the response.
CASI stands for ‘‘computer-assisted self-administered interview.’’ People
sit at a computer and answer questions on their own, just like they would if
they received a questionnaire in the mail. People can come to a central place
to take a CASI survey or you can send them a disk in the mail that they can
plug into their own computer ...oryoucanevensetupthesurveyonthe
web and people can take it from any Internet connection. (For more on diskby-mail
surveys, see Van Hattum and de Leeuw [1999]. For more on CASI,
see de Leeuw and Nicholls [1996], Nicholls et al. [1997], and de Leeuw et al.
[2003].) People take very quickly to computer-based interviews and often find
them to be a lot of fun. Fun is good because it cuts down on fatigue. Fatigue
is bad because it sends respondents into robot mode and they stop thinking
about their answers (O’Brien and Dugdale 1978; Barnes et al. 1995). I ran a
computer-based interview in 1988 in a study comparing the social networks
of people in Mexico City and Jacksonville, Florida. One member of our team,
Christopher McCarty, programmed a laptop to ask respondents in both cities
about their acquaintanceship networks. Few people in Jacksonville and almost
no one in Mexico City had ever seen a computer, much less one of those
clunky lugables that passed for laptops then. But our respondents said they
enjoyed the experience. ‘‘Wow, this is like some kind of computer game,’’ one
respondent said.
Today, of course, the technology is wildly better and fieldworkers are running
computer-assisted interview surveys all over the world. Hewett et al.
(2004) used A-CASI technology—for ‘‘audio, computer-assisted, self-administered
interview’’—in a study of 1,293 adolescents in rural and urban Kenya
about very sensitive issues, like sexual behavior, drug and alcohol use, and
abortion. With A-CASI, the respondent listens to the questions through headphones
and types in his or her answers. The computer—a digitized voice—
asks the questions, waits for the answers, and moves on. In the Kenya study,
Hewett et al. used yes/no and multiple choice questions and had people punch
in their responses on an external keypad. The research team had to replace a
few keypads and they had some cases of battery failure, but overall, they
report that the computers worked well, that only 2% of the respondents had
trouble with the equipment (even though most of them had never seen a computer)
and that people liked the format (ibid.:322–324).
This doesn’t mean that computers are going to replace live interviewers any