Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

266 Chapter 10
ing the extra money and worrying about quality control. Recall that for estimating
population proportions or means, you have to quadruple the sample
size to halve the sampling error. If you can’t afford to hire three more interviewers
(beside yourself), and to train them carefully so that they at least
introduce the same bias to every interview as you do, you’re better off running
the survey yourself and saving the money for other things.
This only goes for surveys in which you interview a random sample of
respondents in order to estimate a population parameter. If you are studying
the experiences of a group of people, or are after cultural data (as in ‘‘How
are things usually done around here?’’), then getting more interviews is better
than getting fewer, whether you collect the data yourself or have them collected
by others.
Training Interviewers
If you hire interviewers, be sure to train them—and monitor them throughout
the research. A colleague used a doctoral student as an interviewer in a
project in Atlanta. The senior researcher trained the student but listened to the
interview tapes that came in. At one point, the interviewer asked a respondent:
‘‘How many years of education do you have?’’ ‘‘Four,’’ said the respondent.
‘‘Oh,’’ said the student researcher, ‘‘you mean you have four years of education?’’
‘‘No,’’ said the informant, bristling and insulted, ‘‘I’ve had four years
of education beyond high school.’’ The informant was affluent; the interview
was conducted in his upper-middle-class house; he had already told the interviewer
that he was in a high-tech occupation. So monitor interviewers.
If you hire a team of interviewers, you have one extra chore besides monitoring
their work. You need to get them to act as a team. Be sure, for example,
that they all use the same probes to the various questions on the interview
schedule. Especially with open-ended questions, be sure to do random spot
checks, during the survey, of how interviewers are coding the answers they
get. The act of spot-checking keeps coders alert. When you find discrepancies
in the way interviewers code responses, bring the group together and discuss
the problem openly.
Narratives are coded after the interview. If you use a team of coders, be
sure to train them together and get their interrater reliability coefficient up to
at least .70. In other words, make sure that your interviewers use the same
theme tags to code each piece of text. For details on how to do this, see the
section on Cohen’s Kappa in chapter 17.
Billiet and Loosveldt (1988) found that asking interviewers to tape all their
interviews produces a higher response rate, particularly to sensitive questions
about things like sexual behavior. Apparently, when interviewers know that