Conversational Interviewing

Conversational interviewing is also known as “flexible” interviewing or “conversationally flexible” interviewing. These terms refer to an alternative style of survey interviewing that allows deviations from the norms of standardized interviewing. Under conversational interviewing procedures, interviewers are allowed to ask respondents if they did not understand a question and provide unscripted feedback to clarify the meaning of questions as necessary. Conversational interviewing represents an alternative set of techniques to standardized survey interviewing whereby interviewers are allowed to provide unscripted information to respondents in an effort to clarify question meaning.

Proponents of conversational interviewing techniques argue that standardized procedures may reduce the accuracy of survey responses because standardization precludes conversational interactions that may be required for respondents to understand some questions. A key distinction between standardized and conversational interviewing is that standardization requires the interpretation of questions to be accomplished entirely by respondents. A central tenet of standardized interviewing is that interviewers must always read questions, response options, and instructions to respondents exactly as they are scripted. Further definitions, clarifications, or probes can only be read in standardized interviews if these elements are included in the interview script. A second tenet of standardized interviewing is that any probes used by interviewers must be nondirective, so that the probes do not lead respondents to give particular answers. As a result, standardized interviewers can only provide clarification when respondents request it, and can then only provide standardized forms of assistance such as nondirective probes.

In conversational interviewing, interviewers can provide whatever information is needed to clarify question meaning for respondents, and they can provide these clarifying statements whenever they perceive respondents are having difficulty understanding a question. Proponents of conversational interviewing hypothesize that these more flexible techniques can produce more accurate survey responses by standardizing the meaning of questions, not the wording or exact procedures used to administer the questions. Because the same terms can have different meanings to different respondents, conversational interviewing may improve response accuracy by allowing unscripted exchanges between interviewers and respondents to clarify the meaning of specific terms. Based on this reasoning, conversational interviewing techniques are assumed to increase the accuracy of survey responses, particularly in those situations in which respondents cannot initially map the specific terms in a question to the relevant information they have to report.

Experimental studies have been conducted to assess whether more flexible conversational interviewing techniques could produce more accurate data than standardized procedures for some survey questions. In these experiments, respondent interviews were assigned either to a standardized condition in which interviewers were not allowed to deviate from the script or to a conversational condition in which interviewers were allowed to encourage respondents to ask questions if they did not understand and provide unscripted feedback to clarify the meaning of question terms.

Results of this research indicated that the two alternative interviewing procedures both produced nearly perfect accuracy when question concepts clearly mapped onto the situations respondents had to report. For example, respondents were asked about purchasing furniture, so those who had purchased items like tables and chairs could clearly map their situation onto the question concept and accurately answer this question with either interviewing procedure. In contrast, respondents who had purchased an item such as a lamp, for example, could not clearly answer the question about purchasing furniture. In interviews in which question concepts did not clearly match respondents' situations, conversational interviewing procedures increased response accuracy by nearly 60%. Additional research indicated that data from follow-up interviews using conversational techniques increased the accuracy of reports compared to an initial round of standardized interviews. In addition, respondents in this experiment were twice as likely to change their answers between a first standardized interview and a second conversational interview (22%) than between a first standardized interview and a second standardized interview (11%). The results of these experiments generally confirmed that conversational techniques led to greater response accuracy when ambiguity existed between the key concepts of the question and the information respondents had to report.

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