# **1. Introduction**

Collecting data through quantitative interviews can be an awkward social interaction. An inherent tension is created between the societal norms of conversation and the survey protocols needed to standardize information across a range of interviewers and respondents (Kahn & Cannell, 1957, Suchman & Jordon, 1980). Individual interviewers may have differing levels of success in navigating this interaction, creating interviewer effects in the data. The further the interview is from normal conversation, such as discussing sensitive topics with a stranger, the more likely it is to find non-trivial impacts from the interviewer (Schnell & Kreuter, 2005).

The tension between culture and protocol is often amplified in developing country settings. Traditional societies often have strict cultural codes of behavior. Interviewing is also generally conducted face-to-face, and therefore more reminiscent of a social setting than a telephone or e- mail survey. In Timor-Leste, traditional society is particularly hierarchical, with a history of exclusion of women, minorities, and the youth. In addition data collection for this study took place in 2008, following the end of decades of conflict. While political violence and other organized aggression was rare at this time, simmering ethnic and regional tensions remained. The questions in this study focus on the respondent’s perceptions of corruption, community dispute resolution, women’s rights, and land claims, all potentially contentious topics.

Two main methodological questions are addressed in this paper. First, are interviewer effects present in the survey data, and, if so, is the magnitude greater for the sensitive subjective questions compared to more objective questions? Secondly, what, if any conclusions can be drawn regarding the nature of these interviewer effects? The main hypothesis is that if interviewer effects were present, respondents would likely show a form of social desirability bias (Crowne and Marlowe, 1960), deferring to the traditional norms of hospitality to give the answer they perceive the interviewer “guest” would like to hear. The respondent’s expectations are based on the interviewer’s observable traits and possible additional cues given by the interviewer based on their opinions. The expectation is that this would lead to pro-state responses to young or female interviewers and more conservative responses to older male interviewers.

The analysis makes use of a unique data set available from Timor-Leste which specifically examines the characteristics of the respondent, the characteristics of the interviewer, and the interviewer’s personal opinions on the survey questions. It also briefly addresses the question of salience with a more detailed analysis of gender and the women’s rights question. The analysis uses fixed effects logit and multi-level mixed-effects logistic regression modeling to test for the interviewer effects. Once the presence of these effects has been identified, I attempt to estimate the amount of total variation they are capable of explaining, and to estimate the explanatory power of the three available interviewer characteristics, age, gender, and the interviewer’s opinion, as well as the associated interaction terms.

The next section briefly reviews existing literature on interviewer effects as it relates to the research questions. Section 3 discusses the data, results are presented in section 4, and section 5 offers a brief conclusion and possible areas of future research.

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