Conferences

In a large-scale survey on mental health issues (N=2981), suicidal ideation has been measured with the five screening items from the Beck Suicide Ideation Scale.

Questioning about suicide ideation is not an easy task for an interviewer. Reporting about suicidal thoughts may be painful and threatening to respondents if such ideations are present. But it may also work in another way: questioning after suicide ideation may hamper rapport between interviewer and respondent when it becomes very clear, after asking the first screening questions, that suicide ideation is not present and the interviewer continues asking questions on this topic.

In order to ease this difficult interviewer task, interviewers were allowed to skip some questions, if they were convinced that they already had enough information to come up with a positive or negative score on the presence of suicidal ideation. Moreover, interviewers had some freedom to adjust the wording of the questions to what the respondent had already reported, implying loosing the standardization of interviewer behaviour so much striven for in survey designs.

In analyzing the response distributions of suicidal ideation we found proof of highly significant interviewer effects.

To investigate what particular type of interviewer behaviour contributed to these interviewer effects, transcripts of more than 500 interviews were analysed with a, for this purpose developed, coding scheme.

Coding was done with the aid of the Sequence Viewer software by trained and supervised coders. The inter-coder reliability was quite sufficient.

Using the search procedures of Sequence Viewer, i.e., looking for the occurrence of specific patterns of codes in the sequences, enabled the exploration of differences between interviewers in questioning techniques used. This detailed observation of the question- answer process made it possible to gain more insight in interviewer and respondent behaviour when involved in questioning such ‘loaded’ topics.