Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Structured Interviewing I: Questionnaires 287
pretest respondents, no matter whether you’re doing face-to-face interviews,
CAPI, mail surveys, etc. In this method, people think out loud as they decide
on how to answer each question in a survey. There are three alternative outcomes
with the thinkaloud technique: (1) People understand the question just
as you intended them to; (2) People understand the question very well, but not
the way you intended them to; and (3) People don’t understand the question
at all. Edwards et al. (2005) used this method to pretest a 28-question survey
on the use of condoms by women sex workers in Mombassa, Kenya. The result
was a survey with culturally appropriate vocabulary for various types of sex
clients. (For more on the thinkaloud method, see DeMaio and Rothgeb 1996.)
Never use any of the respondents in a pretest for the main survey. If you
are working in a small community, where each respondent is precious (and
you don’t want to use up any of them on a pretest), take the survey instrument
to another community and pretest it there. This will also prevent the pretest
respondents in a small community from gossiping about the survey before it
actually gets underway. A ‘‘small community,’’ by the way, can be ‘‘the 27
students from Taiwan at your university’’ or all the residents of an Indonesian
rice-farming village.
If you have a team of face-to-face interviewers, make sure they all take part
in the pretest—and be sure to do some of the pretesting yourself. After the
pretests, bring the interviewers together for a discussion on how to improve
the survey instrument. Ask them if people found some questions hard to
answer—or even refused to answer. Ask them if they would change the wording
of any of the questions. Check all this yourself by watching a couple of
interviews done by people on your team and note when informants ask questions
and how the interviewers respond. That way, you can train interviewers
to respond in the same way to questions from informants.
As you conduct the actual survey, ask respondents to tell you what they
think of the study and of the interview they’ve just been through. At the end
of the study, bring all the interviewers back together for an evaluation of the
project. If it is wise to learn from your mistakes, then the first thing you’ve
got to do is find out what the mistakes are. If you give them a chance, your
respondents and your interviewers will tell you.
Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Surveys
Most surveys are cross-sectional. The idea is to measure some variables at
a single time. Of course, people’s attitudes and reported behaviors change
over time, and you never know if a single sample is truly representative of the