Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Structured Interviewing I: Questionnaires 265
viewed recently bereaved respondents about adjustment to widowhood. They
interviewed 192 respondents—104 in person, at home, and 88 by mailed questionnaire.
Both groups got identical questions.
On average, 82% of those interviewed at home 3–4 weeks after losing their
husband or wife answered any given question. Just 68% of those who
responded to the mailed questionnaire answered any given question. As Caserta
et al. explain, the physical presence of the interviewer helped establish the
rapport needed for asking sensitive and personal questions about the painful
experience of bereavement (ibid.:640).
If you are working in a highly industrialized country, and if a very high
proportion (at least 80%) of the population you are studying has their own
telephones, then consider doing a phone survey whenever a self-administered
questionnaire would otherwise be appropriate.
If you are working alone or in places where the mails and the phone system
are inefficient for data collection, the drop-and-collect technique is a good
alternative (see above, page 258).
Finally, there is no rule against using more than one type of interview. Mauritius,
an island nation in the Indian Ocean, is an ethnically complex society.
Chinese, Creoles, Franco-Mauritians, Hindus, Muslims, and other groups
make up a population of about a million. Ari Nave (1997) was interested in
how Mauritians maintain their ethnic group boundaries, particularly through
their choices of whom to marry. A government office on Mauritius maintains
a list of all people over 18 on Mauritius, so it was relatively easy for Nave to
get a random sample of the population.
Contacting the sample was another matter. Nave got back just 347 out 930
mailed questionnaires, but he was able to interview another 296 by telephone
and face to face, for a total of 643, or 69% of his original sample—a respectable
completion rate.
Using Interviewers
There are several advantages to using multiple interviewers in survey
research. The most obvious is that you can increase the size of the sample.
Multiple interviewers, however, introduce several disadvantages, and whatever
problems are associated with interviewer bias are increased with more than
one interviewer.
Just as important, multiple interviewers increase the cost of survey
research. If you can collect 100 interviews yourself and maintain careful quality
control in your interview technique, then hiring one more interviewer
would probably not improve your research by enough to warrant both spend-