Conferences

Interviewers play a key role in contacting and convincing potential respondents and recent research has focused on the role of interviewer attitudes and behaviour on nonresponse (Campanelli et al, 1997, De Leeuw et al, 1997, Groves & Couper, 1998; Hox & De Leeuw, 2002; Stoop, 2003). As part of this effort, several interviewer questionnaires were developed and analysed (for an overview see Hox & de Leeuw, 1998; Hox, de Leeuw, et al, 2002), and the need arose for one standardized questionnaire to stimulate international research. Therefore, IQUEST was developed, a questionnaire for both face-to-face and telephone interviewers. IQUEST incorporated the accumulated knowledge of the earlier interviewer questionnaires, omitting questions that did not work based on both psychometric and substantial analysis. Also new questions were added based on new theoretical and empirical insights. A master version was developed containing context information about the questions; English was used as lingua franca (Harkness et all, 2003). This master questionnaire was checked for clarity and intercultural translatability, and made available to countries participating in the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002. As the ESS 2002 used highly standardized questionnaires and data collection procedures, including strongly standardized field methods and non-response registration, this is an ideal situation to study interviewer effects cross-nationally.

In the present paper, we present the results of this effort. We summarize the results of psychometric analyses on the questionnaires cross nationally, and focus on the effects of interviewers on survey nonresponse cross-nationally.