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150 PART II: Descriptive MethodsPersonal Interviews• Although costly, personal interviews allow researchers to gain more controlover how the survey is administered.• Interviewer bias occurs when survey responses are recorded inaccurately orwhen interviewers guide individuals’ responses.Key ConceptWhen personal interviews are used to collect survey data, respondents areusually contacted in their homes or in a shopping mall, and trained interviewersadminister the questionnaire. The personal interview allows greaterflexibility in asking questions than does the mail survey. During an interviewthe respondent can obtain clarification when questions are unclear, and thetrained interviewer can follow up incomplete or ambiguous answers to openendedquestions. The interviewer controls the order of questions and canensure that all respondents complete the questions in the same order. Traditionally,the response rate to personal interviews has been higher than that formail surveys.The advantages of using personal interviews are impressive, but there arealso a few disadvantages. Increasing fear of urban crime and an increasingnumber of households with no one home during the day have reduced theattractiveness of using personal interviews in the home. A significant disadvantageof conducting personal interviews is the cost. The use of trained interviewersis expensive in terms of both money and time. Perhaps the most critical disadvantageof personal interviews involves the potential for interviewer bias. Theinterviewer should be a neutral medium through which questions and answersare transmitted. Interviewer bias occurs when the interviewer records onlyselected portions of the respondents’ answers or tries to adjust the wording ofa question to “fit” the respondent. For example, suppose a respondent in a surveyabout television states, “The biggest problem with TV shows is too muchviolence.” Interviewer bias would occur if the interviewer writes down “TVviolence” instead of the respondent’s full response. In a follow-up question,interview bias also would occur if the interviewer asked, “By violence, do youmean murders and rapes?” A more neutral probe would allow the respondentto describe what he or she means by asking, “Could you elaborate on what youmean by violence?”The best protection against interviewer bias is to employ highly motivated,well-paid interviewers who are trained to follow question wording exactly, torecord responses accurately, and to use follow-up questions judiciously. Interviewersshould also be given a detailed list of instructions about how difficultor confusing situations are to be handled. Finally, interviewers should beclosely supervised by the director of the survey project.Computer technology makes it possible to use a hybrid of a self-administeredsurvey and a personal interview. A person can listen to computer-recordedquestions read by an interviewer and then respond to the questions on thecomputer. With this technology each respondent literally hears the questionsread by the same interviewer in the same way, thereby reducing the risk of interviewerbias. This technology also allows respondents to answer very personalquestions in relative privacy (Rasinski, Willis, Baldwin, Yeh, & Lee, 1999).