Advances in Longitudinal Survey Methodology

13Interviewer Effects in Panel Surveys

Simon Kühne¹ and Martin Kroh^1,2

¹Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

²Research Fellow of SOEP at DIW Berlin

13.1 Introduction

Many popular cross‐sectional surveys in the social sciences, such as the European Social Survey (ESS, Stoop et al. 2010), and particularly large‐scale panel surveys, such as the Socio‐Economic Panel Survey (SOEP, Goebel et al. 2018), UK Understanding Society (Buck and McFall 2012), the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA, Wooden et al. 2002), and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, Börsch‐Supan et al. 2013) rely on face‐to‐face interviews.¹ Interviewers contribute to (panel) data quality by maintaining high participation rates, handling complex survey instruments and questionnaires, and providing assistance and clarifications to respondents (Fowler and Mangione 1990). This is why many panel studies rely on interviewers despite their high costs compared to other modes of data collection, such as mail and web surveys (for an overview of the dis/advantages of different modes of data collection, see Groves 2004; Groves et al. 2009). However, survey research also points to a number of disadvantages of interviewer‐administered surveying, showing, among others, that interviewers can trigger undesired respondent behaviour and measurement error through their presence and their characteristics. Measurement error occurs, for instance, in the form ...