Measuring the homogeneity of interviewers practices in readership surveys

Ensuring that all interviewers have the same way of interrogating interviewees is a key element in the field management of a survey. Supervisors and standardized training and briefing are there to homogenise the interviewing practices. But, much probably, interviewers tend not to work in the same way at the beginning of a survey and after having worked for a few days on it. Controlling for this is all the more important for readership surveys, for which field may last several months. In France as in most countries, interviewers are on short time contracts, which ensures a great flexibility in the way the studies can be scheduled, anticipated, postponed, cancelled… But this allows also interviewers to leave the company on very short notice. Due to differential turnover in the population of interviewers, the number of weeks a given interviewer is working on a readership survey may vary greatly across the team of interviewers allocated to that survey.

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