Welcome back.
Continuing with our discussion of interviewing technique,
we just finished discussing the distinction between standardized and
conversational interviewing.
We're shifting our focus now to another distinction,
namely the distinction between personal and formal interviewing techniques.
Or interpersonally engaged might be another way to think of personal,
versus business-like might be another way to think of formal interviewing.
And the question is, which approach produces higher-quality data?
This distinction really, well I think it had been in the literature for some time,
it really was made clear and studied in depth by Dijkstra, and
later with his colleagues Van der Zouwen and Smit.
They explored the distinction between these two interviewing techniques.
And I should just point out, and
I'll reiterate it, this is really orthogonal to, or independent of,
the distinction between standardized and conversational interviewing.
So while formal might sound like standardized, and
personal might sound like conversational, they're really not analogous.
You can have a formal interview that's not at all scripted.
It's just that the content and
the demeanor of the interview are very business-like.
And you can have a conversational interview that's not
particularly personal,
in which the interviewer doesn't attempt to make a connection with respondents but
does clarify the meaning of questions, so just want to reiterate that.
So Dijkstra looked at this in 1987 and noted that the two
techniques shared a lot, namely that the interviewers read questions and probed.
But it really had to do with whether they attempted to
make a connection with the respondents, or instead,
really retained a kind of professional, business-like orientation.
So for the formal style, what Dijkstra reported was,
this actually required interviewers to kind of unlearn their everyday
interviewing practices, where they did,
just because it was kind of more natural, attempt to connect with the respondents.
It required some training to be more business-like.
The personal style involved providing feedback to
respondents with expressions like, that's nice for you, I have similar feelings.
So you can see, these are quite different.
And you might wonder if the personal style is leading or somehow introduces
the influence of the interviewer in a way that would be undesirable.
And that's really what he wanted to test.
So in his study,
the interviewers are randomly assigned to one style or the other.
And then he behavior coded the interaction between them to better
understand how the two interviewing techniques worked.
So Dijkstra really evaluated the impact of interviewing technique on data
quality in two ways, by looking at accuracy and social desirability.
Really, the question he was after was whether the personal style
led to the greater motivation by respondents to work hard and
provide accurate or as accurate answers as possible.
Versus, did it lead to ingratiation, that is, the tendency to say what they thought
the interviewers would want to hear, rather than what was actually the case.
So the accuracy measure was the proportional correctness of a map of their
hometown that he asked them to draw, or that the interviewers asked them to draw.
Was it proportionately correct and did they include the right landmarks,
among other attributes?
And the idea was that if they were motivated to try hard and
provide high-quality data, they would provide more accurate maps.
And the measure of social desirability was their score on a reduced version of
the Marlowe-Crowne impression management scale,
which is a standardized questionnaire that operationalizes impression
management in a series of items.
And the idea is that if they scored higher on the Marlowe-Crowne instrument,
then they were more prone to provide socially desirable answers.
So what he found was, if you look first at the accuracy scores,
in which higher scores in this top table represent greater accuracy, so
we look across the top row and compare it to the bottom row,
the numbers are bigger for personal versus formal interviewing.
So the personal interviewing style is leading to more accurate maps than
the formal style, which is what the prediction had been.
The concern was that this could be the case, but
it would lead to greater social desirability by increasing ingratiation.
So if you look at the lower table, you can see that actually,
this concern was not supported.
The personal style, if anything,
led to lower scores than the formal style for both males and females.
So it appears that accuracy does not come at the cost of increased
social desirability.
So Dijkstra followed up on this initial study with his
colleagues Van der Zouwen and Smit.
And what they did, among other things,
was to actually ask questions that had more and less socially desirable answers,
rather than just administering an impression management scale.
So a more direct measure of whether the personal interviewing style would
increase ingratiation, would lead to more socially desirable answers.
The questions they asked has come to be regarded as moderately
socially desirable or moderately socially undesirable.
So for example, they asked the question, after moving to this neighborhood,
did you try to make contact with people living here?
The desirable answer would be to say, yes, I did, even if that's not the case.
But it's not so stigmatized to say no, to give the undesirable,
accurate answer to that.
One could imagine respondents would be willing to do this, at
the same time that they felt they'd made a personal connection with the interviewer.
We'll look in a bit at a study which asked more sensitive questions than this, and
examined whether the relationship with the interviewer
affected the social desirability of responses.
But for this question, if you look across the table, you can see that about 18%
more respondents answered no, gave the undesirable answer, the more truthful
answer presumably, when interviewed in the personal style than in the formal style.
So that would suggest that they are giving more truthful answers,
they're not ingratiating themselves to the interviewer,
when the interviewer has made a personal connection with the respondents.
A second question with a moderately socially undesirable answer is,
are there people living in this neighborhood who you do not like?