To explore socially desirable responding in telephone surveys, this study examines response latencies in answers to 27 questions in a corpus of 319 audio-recorded voice interviews on iPhones. Response latencies were compared when respondents (a) answered questions on sensitive vs. nonsensitive topics (as classified by online raters); (b) produced…

Survey interviews are conducted to produce objective, accurate information in which interviewers ask questions as worded and their discretionary speech is carefully managed. To limit interviewer influence over answers and reduce between-interviewer variance, Standardized Interviewing (SI) requires interviewers to administer "nondirective…

Bias may be introduced in survey data collection when participants answer questions differently depending on interviewer gender. This could affect the validity of collected data, especially sensitive data. Using sexual behavior data collected in a 2017-2018 cross-sectional survey of Haitian women (n = 304), we evaluated the associations between…

Survey researchers are increasingly concerned that the presence of other people (bystanders) may affect data quality in structured, face-to-face survey interviews. In this article, we study bystanders using data from 15,309 face-to-face surveys about technology from Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Brazil and Guatemala. Our analysis (1) describes the…

This paper investigates the effect of interview mode (telephone vs. face-to-face) on responses to a 13-item module of identity questions covering distinct domains. With increasing moves towards mixed-mode implementation, especially in longitudinal surveys, establishing whether mode effects are likely to influence findings is of practical value. A…