;;Whatever It Means To You;;:Ethnicity, Language, and the Survey Response in Telephone-Administered Health Surveys of African Americans.

Interviewer Effects in Health Surveys of African Americans;Health Sciences;Social Sciences;Health Behavior & Health Education

Davis, Rachel EllenJanz, Nancy K. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Interviewer Effects in Health Surveys of African Americans;    Health Sciences;    Social Sciences;    Health Behavior & Health Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/61672/reda_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Many public health surveys match the race of telephone interviewers to the anticipated race of respondents.This practice may be particularly prevalent when surveying populations with a possible mistrust of health research, such as African Americans.Interviewer race effects have received little scientific evaluation in telephone-administered health surveys with African Americans, and no empirical studies have explored respondents’ preferences for interviewer race or the role of ethnic identity in survey interactions.These dynamics may have important implications for respondents’ experiences with health surveys and, ultimately, survey data.This dissertation reviewed the interviewer effects literature and considered the importance of interviewer-associated measurement error in public health surveys.It also described the results of two empirical studies.The first study explored African American telephone survey respondents’preferences for interviewer race.This study found that respondents with Afrocentric, Black American, and Cultural Mistrust ethnic identity components preferred to interact with African American interviewers and that interviewer race was less important to respondents with Assimilated, Bicultural, or Multicultural identity components.Respondents’ preferences for being surveyed by an African American interviewer were stronger when a survey contained more racial content.The second study explored the influence of African American telephone interviewers’ ethnic identity types and the use of African American English (AAE) on the survey interaction.Interviewers with a Bicultural ethnic identity component may have been more prone to using AAE features during telephone surveys with African American respondents than interviewers with other identity components.Interviewers used AAE features less when engaged in recruitment tasks and appeared to have used them more when administering nonracial, sensitive survey items.No pattern emerged for use of AAE during racially topical survey sections.Whether interviewers had a Black American ethnic identity component and their use of AAE features had no impact on respondents’ answers to racially topical survey items.The findings from this dissertation suggest that public health professionals should measure and control for interviewer effects on health survey data, be cognizant of the potential role of identity expression during survey interactions, and resist a general policy of matching African American interviewers and respondents by racial characteristics alone.