Interviewers’ within-survey workload: Measurement and association with task efforts and performance

The concept of “interviewer burden” suggests that if interviewers experience their tasks as more burdensome (e.g., because of a heavy workload, poor questionnaire design, long interviews, difficult to interview respondents) they adjust their behavior, taking shortcuts in order to reduce the expended time and effort on the survey (“interviewer satisficing”). Applied to face-to-face interviewers’ activities during the contact procedure, this would imply that interviewers with a high burden may be less willing to make additional visits, may give up on difficult samples units prematurely, and may push for a quick decision instead of maintaining the interaction in a single or over multiple visits. Such interviewer satisficing behaviors in the contact procedure harm the effectiveness and efficiency of the fieldwork process, putting additional pressure on the quality-cost trade-off. In this paper we focus on one aspect of interviewer burden: the workload within the survey, which varies over the fieldwork period. We assess the effect of this within-survey workload, on the outcomes of the contact process in the European Social Survey in Belgium. Call history and assignment paradata allow the construction of more fine-grained measurements of interviewer workload over the fieldwork period than traditionally used. We will derive within-survey workload as a time-varying interviewer characteristic, measured as (1) the number of sample units for which interviewer activity has started and not yet ceased on any day t, and (2) the number of sample units for which interviewer activity is possible on any day t. Such operationalizations capture changes in the interviewers’ workloads as the fieldwork progresses.status: publishe