Analiza błędów pracy ankietera w wywiadzie kwestionariuszowym na podstawie zapisu magnetofonowego

Abstract

In the analysis the authors try to define the number and character of errors made by the interviewers during questionnaire interviewing and they endeavour to explain the reasons they are due to. The analysis is based on 20 interviews recorded by the interviewers who at the same time were entering the respondents’ replies in the questionnaire. The authors are mainly interested in the errors the interviewers made when asking questions and entering answers. The errors due to the fact that the interviewers did not follow the general principles of their work were not taken into account« It appears that the error most frequently made by the interviewers when asking questions are the probing errors which constitute 89.9 per cent of the total amount of errors. When answers were entering the most, frequent error consisted in omitting additional information which amount to 58.4 per cent of all the errors made at noting the answers down. The most serious error i.e. a distortion of the information constitute 10.5 percent of all the errors made at entering the answers. The analysis has proved that both when questions were asked and answers noted down the errors depended on the difficulty of questions. When the questions were difficult the interviewers made relatively many errors i.e. they asked wrong survey questions or did not ask them at all, the answers were not entered properly either. It also appears that some errors made when questions were asked were caused by exhaustion which, accounts for the interviewer’s lower self-control and decreased accuracy in this work. Other hypotheses concerning the dependence between errors and the interviewer, the character of questions, the order of interviews were confirmed to a very small extent. There was no clear interdependence between the making of errors and the factors mentioned above. It should be emphasized that the empirical data being not very numerous, often not adequate for the accepted hypothesis, the conclusions drawn by the authors can be only hypothetical. The percentage of serious errors is not high (about 10 per cent). It constitutes probably a minimum of errors which may be made at present by the interviewers in Poland. It seems that the low index might have been influenced by the following factors: the interviewers knew that the interviews were recorded and this fact caused a stronger self-control of their behaviour, the analysis covered the work of good interviewers only, the errors were analysed only in interviews with questionnaire. It may be assumed that the amount of errors will increase in free interviews, when the interviewers are not so good or when there is no direct control of the interviewer-respondent relation. In those cases it can also be assumed that the ratio of particular types of errors will be altered or that other errors will occur.