The effect of interviewers' motivation and attitudes on respondents' consent to contact secondary respondents in a multi-actor design

Abstract

In surveys using a multi-actor design, data is collected not only from sampled ‘primary’ respondents, but also from related persons such as partners, colleagues, or friends. For this purpose, primary respondents are asked for their consent to survey such ‘secondary’ respondents. The existence of interviewer effects on unit nonresponse of sampled respondents in surveys is well documented, and research increasingly focuses on interviewer attributes in the non-response process. However, research regarding interviewer effects on unit nonresponse of secondary respondents, more specifically, primary respondents’ consent to include secondary respondents into the survey, is sparse. We use the German Family Panel (pairfam) and an interviewer survey conducted during the fifth wave of the panel (2012) to investigate the effects of interviewer motivation and attitudes on respondents’ consent to a survey of their parents via a separate mail questionnaire. Using multi-level models, we find a substantial interviewer effect on consent rates when not controlling for interviewer characteristics. In a second step, we include variables which capture interviewers’ work motivation and attitudes. Our results show that being motivated for the job as an interviewer by interest in the work itself as well as attitudes towards persuading respondents are both associated with interviewers’ success in obtaining respondent consent to a parent survey. However, interviewer characteristics (including motivation and attitudes) are only able to explain a small part of the interviewer effect.