a household member has about the interviewer who's trying to persuade them
to take part in the study Is what they sound like and how they speak.
Really, telephone interviewing may sort of concentrate sample members
on interviewers' vocal properties and the way they interact.
In one study, Conrad and his colleagues Coded the behavioral attributes
of interviewers in 1300 telephone survey introductions.
These are audio recorded telephone introductions from
five studies that were conducted at the University of Michigan.
And the behaviours they coded included fluencies like um's and ah's.
What are known as back channels these were by the household member the sample member
not by the interviewer, back channels are for
example saying uh-huh and nodding although of course
on the telephone the interviewer would never see the household member nodding but
saying uh-huh is generally considered an acknowledgement,
a way to say to the speaker, yeah please continue I'm still listening,
and over speech and interruptions, and that's called simultaneous speech.
The idea being that these generally signal
some sort of troubled interaction if there's a lot of overspeech.
And they modeled the impact of these different behaviors
on one of three outcomes.
Agreement to take part in the study, refusal scheduled callback which
basically refers to deferring the decision until later so
the interviewer and the household member agree that someone,
maybe not the interviewer there currently talking, but somebody will call them back
in the future to talk about a possibility of taking part in the study.
So a scheduled callback is kind of In between it agreement and refusal and
so they were looking at these three outcomes on the basis of behaviors like
disfluency a household member back channels and over speech or interruptions.
So the first finding was that fillers or disfluencies like ums and
uhs, are both good and bad when it comes to participation.
So this figure shows us the filler rate, or the disfluency rate, per hundred words.
And the rates are broken into these quintiles.
The y-axis is the proportion of degrees as a function of the filler rate.
So you can see when interviewers are making zero disfluencies,
that is when they're highly fluent.
They're actually quite unsuccessful in recruiting household members.
This is actually the lowest agreement rate of all the quintiles.
As soon as they make even a small number of disfluencies,
this is more than 0 and less that 1.28 per 100 words, so not a lot of disfluency.
Agreement rate goes up substantially to 0.35.
It tends to drop off as they get more until,
when they're making the maximum number of disfluencies, fillers, greater than three
point four nine per hundred words, it's at it's lowest when there are any fillers.
However, even when interviewers are highly disfluent,
they're more successful than when they're perfectly fluent.
And the thinking was that, when they're perfectly fluent, they sound robotic.
And they don't seem to be tailoring the invitation,
the recruitment speech for the particular household member.
That seems to be the big disincentive to participate.
Another speech behavior that's involved in recruitment is, as I mentioned,
backchannels.
The household members produce more back channels uh-huh and okay or I see.
Where they ultimately agree.