RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

222 SURVEYS AND DEVELOPMENTAL STUDIES
the interviewer to travel long distances to reach
interviewees, which can be expensive both in time
and travel costs (Bailey 1994: 175). If interviews
are intended to be conducted in the participants’
own homes, then participants may be unwilling to
admit strangers. Moreover, neighbourhoods may
be dangerous for some researchers to visit (e.g.
awhiteresearcherwithaclipboardgoingintoa
non-white area of great deprivation, or a black
researcher going into a conservative white area).
Telephone surveys
Telephone surveys, it is claimed (Dooley 2001:
122), have the advantage of reducing costs in time
and travel, for where a potential respondent is not
at home a call-back costs only a few coins and the
time to redial. Re-visits to often distant locations,
on the other hand, can incur considerable expense
in time and travel. Furthermore, if the intended
participant is unable or unwilling to respond,
then it is a relatively easy matter to maintain
the required sample size by calling a replacement.
Again, where respondents are unable or unwilling
to answer all the questions required, then their
partial replies may be discarded and further
substitutes sought from the sample listing. It is
easy to see why telephone interviews must always
have a much longer list of potential respondents
in order to attain the required sample size.
On the other hand, not everyone has a
telephone (e.g. the poor, the young, the less
educated) and this may lead to a skewed sample.
Nor, for that matter, is everyone available for
interview, particularly if they work. Furthermore,
many people are ex-directory, i.e. their numbers
are withheld from public scrutiny. In addition,
Dooley (2001: 123) reports that others – the
younger, unmarried and higher occupational status
groups – use answering machines that may screen
out and delete researchers’ calls. These could also
lead to a skewed sample.
Even when the telephone is answered, the
person responding may not be the most suitable
one to take the call; she or he may not know
the answer to the questions or have access to the
kind of information required. For example, in an
inquiry about household budgets, the respondent
may simply be ignorant about a family’s income
or expenditure on particular items. A child may
answer the call or an elderly person who may
not be the householder. Interviewers will need to
prepare a set of preliminary, screening questions or
arrange a call-back time when a more appropriate
person can be interviewed.
Telephone interviewing has its own strengths
and weaknesses. For example, more often than not
arespondent’ssexwillbeclearfromtheirvoice,so
particular questions may be inappropriate. On the
other hand, it is unwise to have several multiple
choices in a telephone interview, as respondents
will simply forget the categories available, there
being no written prompts to which the respondent
can refer.
Similarly, order effects can be high: items
appearing early in the interview exert an influence
on responses to later ones, while items appearing
early in a list of responses may be given
greater consideration than those occurring later,
amatternotconfinedtotelephonesurveysbut
to questionnaires in general. Dooley (2001: 136)
indicates that 17 per cent difference in agreement
was recorded to a general statement question
when it appeared before rather than after aspecific
statement. He cites further research demonstrating
that responses to particular questions are affected
by questions surrounding them. His advice is to ask
general questions before specific ones. Otherwise,
the general questions are influenced by earlier
responses to specific questions. Once again, this is
amatternotconfinedtotelephonesurveysbutto
questionnaires in general.
Further, if the questioning becomes too
sensitive, respondents may simply hang up in the
middle of the survey interview, tell lies or withhold
information. Dooley (2001: 123) reports that, in
comparison to face-to-face interviews, telephone
respondents tend to produce more missing data, to
be more evasive, more acquiescent (i.e. they tend
to agree more with statements) and more extreme
in their responses (e.g. opting for the extreme ends
of rating scales).
Because telephone interviews lack the sensory
stimulation of visual or face-to-face interviews