Modal and Interviewer Effects in Egocentric Network Research: Experimental Comparison of Face-to-face and Web Surveys

• In Event: 4349 - Issues in Social Network Data, Analysis and Epistemology

Abstract

Surveys of egocentric networks, particularly name-eliciting ones, are especially vulnerable to methods effects, but exactly what the effects are and how they emerge remain opaque. This study advances our knowledge by applying an experiment: random assignment of respondents to receive essentially identical questions posed either in person or by an online survey. We drew several hundred respondents from a general population and asked several different name-eliciting questions. We also exploited audio recordings to reveal the dynamics of the in-person interviews. Face-to-face interviews yielded more cooperation and higher quality data but fewer names than did the web surveys. In exploring explanations for that finding, we ended up turning to interviewer effects. In the end, the best explanation for the modal difference is that, despite instructions, some interviewers did not insistently prompt respondents to list additional names in ways as effective as the prompting effect on web respondents of seeing blank lines for names displayed on a screen. Exploratory analysis suggests that the two methods effects, especially interviewer differences, influenced the total number of names substantially but not the substantive findings. Implications for future work entail greater training and supervision of interviewers in order to both garner the advantage of face-to-face surveys and minimize discrepancies in network size.

Authors

• Claude S. Fischer, University of California-Berkeley

• Lindsay Bayham, University of California-Berkeley