Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Structured Interviewing I: Questionnaires 281
erlands, Nederhof (1985) conducted a mail survey on attitudes toward suicide
and achieved a 65% response rate. Pretty impressive. Outside of North
America and northern Europe, Jussaume and Yamada (1990) achieved a
response rate of 56% in Kobe, Japan, and de Rada (2001) had a response rate
of 61% in mostly rural Navarra Province in Spain.
The average response rate for face-to-face interviews in the United States
was between 80% and 85% during the 1960s, but fell to less than 70% in the
early 1970s (American Statistical Association 1974). It has apparently recovered
somewhat as more is learned about how to maximize cooperation by
potential respondents.
Willimack et al. (1995), for example, report a refusal rate of 28% for faceto-face
interviews in the annual Detroit Area Study conducted by the University
of Michigan. They also report that giving people a gift-type ballpoint pen
(a small, nonmonetary incentive) before starting a face-to-face interview lowered
refusal rates and increased the completeness of responses to questions.
The bottom line is that, with everything we’ve learned over the years about
how to do mailed surveys, the gap between the response rate to personal interviews
and mailed questionnaires is now insignificant, when everything is done
right, but the rate of refusals is high in all forms of surveys.
Many scholars are concerned with the response rate problem (Roth and
BeVier 1998; Turley 1999; Synodinos and Yamada 2000), but it remains to be
seen how much refusals affect the outcomes of surveys—that is, the ability to
say accurate things about the population we are studying (Krosnick 1999;
Morin 2004). This does not in any way reduce the value of personal interviews,
especially for anyone working in developing nations. It does mean,
however, that if you are conducting mailed survey research in the United
States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, or Japan, you should
use Dillman’s method.
Steps in Dillman’s Method
1. Professionalism: Mailed questionnaires must look thoroughly professional.
Jaded, hard-bitten, oversurveyed people simply don’t respond to amateurish
work. Fortunately, with today’s word processing, making attractive questionnaire
booklets is easy. Use standard-size paper: 8.5 11 in the United States and
slightly longer, A4 paper, in the rest of the world. Several researchers have found
that light green paper produces a higher response rate than white paper (Fox et
al. 1988). I wouldn’t use any other colors until controlled tests are made.
You must be thinking: ‘‘Controlled tests of paper color?’’ Absolutely. It’s
because social scientists have done their homework on these little things that