Doctoral Dissertation Research: Interviewer Voice Characteristics and Data Quality

University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln NE

Investigators

Abstract

Telephone interviews frequently contain socially desirable, socially undesirable, and complex questions that tend to produce problems for respondents. A speaker may be especially likely to change vocal patterns for these types of questions. These changes may either directly affect data quality or indirectly affect data quality through the listener's perception of the voice. As telephone surveys continue to be the primary mode of data collection for many large national studies, it is important to understand how interviewer voices affect data quality. This study will examine whether interviewer voice characteristics affect data quality in socially desirable, undesirable, and complex survey questions. Interviewer voices are the primary means of communication to respondents in telephone interviews. If voice characteristics of interviewers affect data quality, those overseeing interviews may be able to select or train interviewers to modify some of their vocal characteristics with the goal of maximizing data quality. Moreover, results from this research will be useful for selecting interviewers based on voice characteristics for audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI), telephone audio-CASI (T-ACASI), and interactive voice response (IVR) systems with the goal of minimizing measurement error. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, support is provided to enable a promising student to establish a strong, independent research career. Specifically, this study has three objectives. The project will evaluate whether a telephone survey interviewer's objective voice characteristics including speech rate, pitch, intonation, and disfluency are associated with a listener's subjective perception of these voice characteristics and their assessment of five subjective interviewer traits (credibility, confidence, reliability, trustworthiness, and easiness to understand). The project also will examine whether objective voice characteristics of telephone survey interviewers affect data quality in socially desirable, socially undesirable, and complex questions. Finally, the project will investigate whether subjective perceptions of an interviewer's voice mediate the relationship between objective voice characteristics and data quality. The study will objectively measure interviewer's voice characteristics by using the Praat computer software program and will use raters to subjectively evaluate voice characteristics (e.g. pitch and speaking rate) and interviewer traits (e.g. credibility, confidence) on seven-point scales. Hierarchical logistic regression models will be used to examine the association between the objective and subjective voice characteristics and data quality. Measures of data quality include item nonresponse for all questions, rounding answers (e.g. 5, 10) for complex and neutral questions, and the directional hypothesis of more/less is better for socially undesirable/desirable questions.