Am J Epidemiol. 2022 Mar 24;191(5):921-929. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwac024.
Interviewer error has long been recognized in face-to-face surveys, but little is known about interviewer error within face-to-face food frequency questionnaires, particularly in large multisite epidemiologic studies. Using dietary data from the China Multi-Ethnic Cohort (2018-2019), in which all field interviews were audio recorded, we identified a potentially error-prone sample by outlier detection and further examined the interviewer errors by reviewing these error-prone interviews. Among 174,012 questions for 5,025 error-prone interviews, 13,855 (7.96%) questions were identified with interviewer error, which mainly came from falsification (37.53%), coding error (31.71%), and reading deviation (30.76%). We found that 98.29% of interviewers and 73.71% of respondents had at least 1 error, and half of the errors could be attributed to 21.94% of interviewers or to 13.77% of respondents. Higher error risk was observed in complicated questions, such as questions assessing food quantification or referring to seasonally supplied food groups. After correcting the errors, the means and standard deviations of estimated food intakes all decreased. These findings suggested that interviewer error should not be ignored within face-to-face food frequency questionnaires and that more efforts are needed to monitor error-prone interviewers and respondents and reduce survey burdens in questionnaire design.
面谈调查中的访员误差由来已久，但面对面食物频率问卷中的访员误差知之甚少，尤其是在大型多地点的流行病学研究中。我们利用中国多民族队列研究（2018-2019 年）中的饮食数据，这些数据均通过录音进行了记录，通过异常值检测确定了一个可能存在误差的样本，并通过审查这些易出错的访谈进一步检查了访员误差。在 5025 次易出错访谈的 174012 个问题中，发现有 13855 个（7.96%）问题存在访员错误，主要来自伪造（37.53%）、编码错误（31.71%）和阅读偏差（30.76%）。我们发现，98.29%的访员和 73.71%的受访者至少存在 1 次错误，且一半的错误可归因于 21.94%的访员或 13.77%的受访者。在评估食物定量或涉及季节性供应食物组的复杂问题时，错误风险更高。在纠正错误后，估计食物摄入量的均值和标准差均有所下降。这些发现表明，面对面食物频率问卷中不应忽视访员错误，需要更多努力来监测易出错的访员和受访者，并在问卷设计中减少调查负担。
