Conversational Practices with a Purpose: Interaction within the Standardized Interview

Friday April 7, 2006

On April 7, Nora Cate Schaeffer gave the Fourth Distinguished Lecture in a series sponsored by the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) at the University of Maryland.  The title of Professor Schaeffer's talk was "Conversational Practices with a Purpose: Interaction within the Standardized Interview." 

The talk examined actual interactions in survey interviews, drawing on recorded interviews from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to illustrate key points. The interactions between interviewers and respondents in actual interviews contrast both with early views of the survey interview as a “conversation with a purpose” or “conversations at random” and later views based on the formal rules and constraints of standardization as they have developed over several decades.  Prior examinations of interaction in the survey interview have used standardization as a starting point and focused on how successfully standardization has been implemented, for example by examining whether interviewers read questions as worded.  However, as researchers have looked more closely at what interviewers and respondents do, they have described how the participants import into the survey interview conversational practices learned in other contexts.  As these observations have accumulated, they provide a vehicle for exploring how conversational practices might support or undermine the goals of measurement within the survey interview.   

Fred Conrad, an Associate Research Professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, and Elizabeth Martin, Senior Survey Methodologist at the Bureau of the Census, served as discussants.   

Nora Cate Schaeffer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she teaches courses in survey research methods and conducts research on instrument design and interaction in the survey interview. She serves as Faculty Director of the University of Wisconsin Survey Center.  Before receiving her doctorate from the University of Chicago, she worked at the National Opinion Research Center.  She has served on the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council (NRC), the NRC Panel to Review Research and Development Statistics at the National Science Foundation, and the Public Opinion Quarterly Advisory Board of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.  She has taught instrument design at the Summer Institute of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan and through the Joint Program in Survey Methodology.  She has also served on the editorial boards of Public Opinion Quarterly, Sociological Methods and Research, and Sociological Methodology. 

The Joint Program in Survey Methodology offers graduate training in survey methodology and survey statistics, leading to Master's and doctoral degrees.  In addition, it offers certificate and citation programs for non-degree students.  JPSM is funded by a consortium of federal agencies through a contract with the Census Bureau and receives additional funding through cost-sharing agreements with the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, and Westat.