Interviewing Older Adults: A Comparison of Telephone and Face-to-Face Modalities

This article examines telephone interviewing of older adults and compares it with face-to-face interviews. Specifically, the following issues are examined in several national surveys: (1) differences in age distributions between the samples of adults reached in both modes; (2) explanations for potential differences in age distributions; (3) differences between the two modes in demographic characteristics in the adults reached, in interview process and in response quality, and how these mode differences vary by age of the respondents. Telephone surveys tend to underrepresent older persons, and older persons who do participate in a telephone survey are disproportionately well educated. Implications of the lower response rate among older persons are softened by the fact that reponse distributions across a range of questions show little difference by interview mode between older persons and persons of other age groups. A. Regula Herzog is Assistant Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research and the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Willard L. Rodgers is Associate Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Richard A. Kulka is Senior Survey Methodologist at Research Triangle Institute, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. This article is a revised and abbreviated version of three papers presented at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Gerontological Society, San Diego, November 1980. This research was supported by USPHS Grant No. AGO2038 from the National Institute on Aging. The authors wish to thank Lynn Dielman and Mary Grace Moore for able research assistance; Charles Cannell, Philip Converse, Richard Curtin, Robert Groves, Robert Kahn, and the late Angus Campbell for data from several unreleased surveys; and Charles Cannell, Robert Groves, and Berit Ingersoll for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Public Opinion Quairter-ly Vol. 47 405-418 ? 1983 by the Tr-ustees of Columbia Univelsity Published by ElsevierScience Publishing Co, Inc. 0033-362X/83/0047-405/$2.50 This content downloaded from 207.46. 13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:47:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms 406 HERZOG, RODGERS, AND KULKA research has been directed specifically to the use of telephone surveys with older adults. This paper represents an initial effort in that direction. In the type of telephone interview survey considered here, a random-digit dialing method for identifying sample households is used, and interviews with a random adult in each sample household are conducted from a central location. (For a detailed presentation of telephone interviewing methodology see Groves and Kahn, 1979; for a discussion of the sampling procedures see Waksberg, 1978.) A comparison of telephone and face-to-face interview surveys must therefore consider several areas of potential differences between the two: (1) their ability to reach a representative sample of the older population; (2) the nature of the interview process itself; and (3) the quality of the responses obtained. In general, the representativeness of a sample may be jeopardized in two ways. First, the sample may be drawn inaccurately and/or from a frame which systematically excludes certain members of the population. Second, persons who are identified by sampling procedures as respondents may not participate in the survey, thereby introducing systematic bias. With respect to the first point, persons without a telephone are systematically excluded from samples of telephone subscribers. However, this constitutes less of a problem when sampling older persons than when sampling the total population because older persons are slightly more likely than younger persons to have a telephone (Thornberry and Massey, 1978). With respect to the second point, response rates are generally somewhat lower for telephone interviews than similar interviews conducted face-to-face (Groves and Kahn, 1979). Moreover, older adults may be particularly likely to decline an interview on the telephone, since they are more likely than younger adults to have hearing problems (Corso, 1977), less likely to be used to the telephone, and likely to have less formal education. On the other hand, some older persons may be more likely to agree to participate in an interview when contacted by telephone than when contacted in person, because many of them are concerned about being victimized (Clemente and Kleiman, 1976) and interviews by telephone do not require them to admit a stranger to their home. In sum, it is difficult to predict how well telephone interviews will compare with face-to-face interviews in reaching the elderly population, since several potentially important factors apparently work in opposite directions. For several reasons the telephone interview process is expected to be more stressful and demanding than the face-to-face interview, particularly for older respondents. The failing sensory capacities of This content downloaded from 207.46. 13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:47:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms INTERVIEWING OLDER ADULTS 407 older persons and their concerns about their performance (Botwinick, 1978) may make an interview which relies entirely on auditory communication particularly stressful. Telephone interviews also limit the amount and nature of feedback that an interviewer can provide to put a respondent at ease and to make the task more personal (Singer, 1981), factors of importance for good learning performance among older persons (Botwinick, 1978). Finally, telephone interviews often proceed at a more rapid pace than do face-to-face interviews (Groves and Kahn, 1979; Groves, 1978),1 and high speed is yet another factor known to be particularly detrimental to the perceptual and learning performance of older respondents (Botwinick, 1978; Corso, 1977). This paper examines telephone interviewing with older adults and compares this mode with face-to-face interviewing. Specifically, it addresses the following three issues: (1) differences in age distributions between the samples of adults that are reached by both modes; (2) explanations for potential differences in age distributions; (3) differences between the two modes in demographic characteristics of the adults that are reached, in interview process, and in response quality, and how these mode differences vary by age of the respondents.