Refusal Avoidance Training (RAT)

Research interviewers have the difficult task of obtaining the cooperation of respondents. Successful interviewers are able to achieve positive outcomes (completed interviews) while simultaneously avoiding negative outcomes (refusals). Researchers may employ several approaches to improving response rates through refusal avoidance, including the use of refusal avoidance training (RAT), which specifically concentrates on interviewers reducing the proportion of their survey requests that end as a refusal.

Experienced and successful interviewers tailor their approach to individual respondents, rather than using a “one size fits all” approach. To successfully tailor their approach, interviewers must have an extensive set of techniques, strategies, phrases, and so on, that have to be customized to the specific survey request. Interviewers must use active listening skills to pick up on the verbal and nonverbal cues of the respondent. These cues will assist the interviewer in selecting the appropriate response strategy most likely to elicit respondent cooperation.

Interviewers skilled at maintaining interaction (continuing their contact with the respondent) create more opportunity to tailor their approach. As the interaction between the interviewer and the respondent continues, and the time investment grows longer, it becomes more difficult, in theory, for the respondent to break off contact and refuse the survey request.

An innovative approach to the development and implementation of refusal avoidance training was first posited by Robert Groves and K. McGonagle. A three-step process is used to develop a customized (to the survey organization, topic, and sponsor) refusal avoidance training program. The steps are summarized as follows:

• 1.
  Focus groups of experienced interviewers are held to capture specific examples of the actual words used by reluctant respondents to describe their concerns about the survey request. Focus group moderators seek to maximize the number of different types of concerns recalled by the interviewers. Hundreds of utterances from respondents may be collected.
• 2.
  After assembly and elimination of duplicate concerns, senior interviewers and training staff classify the concerns into thematic sets (e.g. concerns about privacy, insufficient time), and then identify the desirable verbal behaviors of interviewers to address the concerns. There are often multiple alternative behaviors that may be used by the expert interviewers in response to a specific utterance; each, however, addresses the expressed concern(s) of the respondent.
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• 3.
  A training curriculum can then be developed and concentrated on, imparting four refusal avoidance skills:

  • a.
    Learning the themes of a potential respondent's concerns.
  • b.
    Learning to classify a potential respondent's actual wording of a concern into those themes (the diagnosis step).
  • c.
    Learning desirable verbal behaviors to address the concerns.
  • d.
    Learning to deliver to the reluctant respondent, in words compatible with their own, a set of statements relevant to their concerns.

A major goal of the refusal avoidance training is to increase the speed of the interviewer's performance on points 3b through 3d.

Additional refusal avoidance skills go beyond quickly and effectively responding to respondent reluctance by concentrating on the opening 5 to 10 seconds of contact with the respondent. An effective introduction, and training to improve the introduction, focuses on interviewer alertness, prior knowledge, perceiving the nature of the respondent's “hello,” and active listening. Effective interviewers are noted for being on high alert for their next survey request. Interviewers should specifically prepare themselves to react to the possible outcomes and reactions of requesting survey participation. Part of being prepared is to glean as much information as possible prior to the request, such as knowledge of the respondent's location (state, city, neighborhood, etc.), knowledge of prior attempts, and the like. Once the interviewer initiates a survey request, there are the verbal cues (and visual cues in the case of face-to-face interviewing) that result from the potential respondent's greeting (i.e. the hello). Does the respondent appear to be impatient? tired? curious? hostile? Interviewers should employ active listening for additional background cues to further tailor their introduction; for example, sounds of activity (kids, household guests, loud music, or television) could prompt the interviewer to use a briefer introduction.

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