ABSTRACT
As people increasingly communicate via live video-even more since the COVID-19 pandemic-how willing will they be to participate via video in large-scale standardized surveys that inform public policy, many of which have historically been carried out in-person? This registered report tests three potential predictors of willingness to participate in a live video interview: How (a) easy, (b) useful, and (c) enjoyable respondents find live video to use in other contexts. A potential survey-specific moderator of these effects is also tested: The extent to which respondents report that they would be uncomfortable answering a particular question on a sensitive topic via live video relative to other survey modes. In the study, 598 online U.S. respondents rated their willingness to take part in a hypothetical live video survey that might ask about personal information, in the context of also rating their willingness to take part in four other survey modes, two interviewer-administered (in-person and telephone) and two self-administered (a text-only web survey and a "prerecorded video" web survey in which respondents play videos of interviewers reading questions and then enter answers). Findings demonstrate that willingness to participate in a live video interview is significantly predicted by the extent to which respondents perceive live video as useful and enjoyable in other contexts and by their relative discomfort disclosing in live video versus other modes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Live video (LV) communication tools (e.g., Zoom) have the potential to provide survey researchers with many of the benefits of in-person interviewing, while also greatly reducing data collection costs, given that interviewers do not need to travel and make in-person visits to sampled households. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of in-person data collection to public health crises, forcing survey researchers to explore remote data collection modes-such as LV interviewing-that seem likely to yield high-quality data without in-person interaction. Given the potential benefits of these technologies, the operational and methodological aspects of video interviewing have started to receive research attention from survey methodologists. Although it is remote, video interviewing still involves respondent-interviewer interaction that introduces the possibility of interviewer effects. No research to date has evaluated this potential threat to the quality of the data collected in video interviews. This research note presents an evaluation of interviewer effects in a recent experimental study of alternative approaches to video interviewing including both LV interviewing and the use of prerecorded videos of the same interviewers asking questions embedded in a web survey ("prerecorded video" interviewing). We find little evidence of significant interviewer effects when using these two approaches, which is a promising result. We also find that when interviewer effects were present, they tended to be slightly larger in the LV approach as would be expected in light of its being an interactive approach. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research using video interviewing.