Landline versus Cell Phone Surveys: Interviewers’ Experience

The aim of this paper is to outline the results of the study that was carried out among CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview) interviewers from October 2009 to August 2010. 12 major Polish research organizations as well as two companies in Norway and Iceland participated in the research. The research was based on a standardized self-completion questionnaire (in total 942 interviewers were surveyed) and in-depth interviews (IDI) which were conducted with 49 experienced CATI interviewers. This paper focuses on specific results of the qualitative part of the project; it investigates difficult situations encountered by the interviewers while conducting telephone surveys. During in-depth interviews, the interviewers were encouraged to describe the differences between “mobile” and “landline” respondents, especially in terms of the persuasiveness of the introductory speech and communication interferences during question-asking and answer-recording stage. The interviewers were also asked to elaborate on the relationship between the probability of encountering difficulties while talking to the respondents on the mobile / landline phone and different features, such as the B2B/B2C (« business to business »/« business to consumers ») character of the project, socio-demographic characteristics of the respondent, sampling procedures (RDD versus list-assisted samples), etc.