The Future of Interviewer-administered Surveys

Authors

• Kristen Olson, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

ORCID IDs

Olson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8004-0226

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2025

Citation

Journal of Official Statistics (2025) 41(3): 845–855

doi: 10.1177/0282423X251318450

Comments

Open access

License: CC BY-NC 4.0

Abstract

One of the most substantial shifts over the last decade has been in the use of in-person and telephone interviewers as a survey mode of administration. Historically in-person surveys switched to being conducted by telephone or mixed with self-administered modes of web and paper questionnaires (de Leeuw 2005; Olson et al. 2012; 2021). As one example, Figure 1 shows the proportion of telephone interviews conducted in three government surveys in the United States—the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), the Current Population Survey (CPS), and the American Community Survey (ACS). The NHIS and CPS traditionally use primarily in-person interviews. Before 2020, less than one-third of NHIS interviews, under one-fifth of the first month-in-sample for the CPS, and about 60% of the CPS interviews for all of the months-in-sample (MIS), were conducted by telephone. Spiking due to COVID-19 travel restrictions in 2020, the plurality (CPS-MIS1) or majority (NHIS, CPS-all-MIS) of these two traditionally in-person surveys are now conducted by telephone. The traditionally mixed-mode ACS uses a combination of telephone and in-person interviews, mail questionnaires and (as of 2013) web questionnaires. In 2019 and earlier, about half of the questionnaires were completed using an interviewer-administered mode; after 2020, this fell to 30% of interviews. Interviewer-administered surveys are not disappearing, but how they are being used in surveys is changing. With this backdrop, I ask, what are future challenges and research needs for interviewer-administered surveys?