Clarke Paul, Sproston Kerry, Thomas Roger
National Centre for Social Research, 35 Northampton Square, EC1V 0AX, London, UK.
Soc Sci Med. 2003 May;56(10):2221-8. doi: 10.1016/s0277-9536(02)00238-1.
Many large-scale health surveys use interviewers to obtain standardised information about the health of the general population. To improve response rates and data quality, the researchers/designers usually brief the interviewers to familiarise them with the survey procedures and stimulate their interest in the survey. However, it is possible that interviewers, having been exposed to researchers' expectations, may inadvertently influence respondents to produce outcomes consistent with those expectations. Such expectations are referred to here as 'expectation-led interviewer effects'. In this paper, the design and results from an experiment to test for expectation-led interviewer effects are described. The experiment involved conducting two health surveys, called the 'experimental' and the 'control', which were identical in every way except that researchers made a reference to a supposed link between childhood and adult health at the experimental survey briefing. The testing procedure was designed prior to data collection to preclude accusations of data dredging and to ensure that the type I error probability was less than 5 percent. No consistent evidence of expectation-led interviewer effects was found, bar a statistically significant effect for health questions requiring the recall of detailed quantitative information. This effect was small, however.
许多大规模健康调查通过访员来获取关于普通人群健康状况的标准化信息。为提高应答率和数据质量，研究人员/设计者通常会对访员进行培训，使他们熟悉调查程序并激发其对调查的兴趣。然而，访员在了解了研究人员的期望后，有可能会不经意地影响受访者，使其给出与这些期望相符的结果。这里将这种期望称为“期望引导的访员效应”。本文描述了一项用于测试期望引导的访员效应的实验设计及结果。该实验包括进行两项健康调查，分别称为“实验组”和“对照组”，二者在各方面均相同，只是在实验组的调查培训中，研究人员提及了儿童期与成年期健康之间的一种假定联系。测试程序在数据收集之前就已设计好，以避免被指责数据挖掘，并确保一类错误概率小于5%。除了对需要回忆详细定量信息的健康问题存在统计学显著效应外，未发现期望引导的访员效应的一致证据。不过，这种效应很小。
