Advances in Longitudinal Survey Methodology

15How to Pop the Question? Interviewer and Respondent Behaviours When Measuring Change with Proactive Dependent Interviewing

Annette Jäckle¹, Tarek Al Baghal¹, Stephanie Eckman², and Emanuela Sala³

¹Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

²Survey Research Division, RTI International, Washington, DC, USA

³Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano‐Bicocca, Milan, Italy

15.1 Introduction

Dependent interviewing (DI) is a technique used in longitudinal surveys, whereby answers given in an interview are used to determine question routing or wording in the following interview. There are two different ways in which previous answers are used. With proactive dependent interviewing, respondents are reminded of their previous answer before being asked to update their status. For example, if at wave 1 a respondent reported being self‐employed, the wave 2 question might read: ‘Last time we interviewed you, you said you were self‐employed. Is this still the case?’ With reactive dependent interviewing, the respondent is asked about their status without reference to their prior answer (e.g. ‘Are you an employee or self‐employed?’). If the answer indicates a change in status, a follow‐up question is triggered to check that the respondent's status has truly changed.

There is evidence that dependent interviewing questions improve the quality of longitudinal data, by reducing spurious changes in responses over time (e.g. Hoogendoorn ...