The qualities of the interviewer, not his sex, race and personal history, were the important" - Discuss.

    Moser and Kalton (1971: 271) describe the survey interview as ‘a conversation between interviewer and respondent with purpose of eliciting certain information from respondent’. This, they continue, might appear a straightforward matter, but the attainment of successful interview is much more complex than this statement might suggest.

The importance of interviewers’ selection

    As interview happened between two persons, the personality of the interviewers might highly affect the quality of interview. That is also what we should discuss in this essay.

Interaction now is not only structured by the questions, but by personal feelings.

    Basically, everybody has his/her personality, temper, emotion and different ways of dealing with the same thing. Although we can through training or other exercise to standardize the basic diathesis that an interviewer should have, there are also much happenchance may be occurred, for example, the customs of the interviewer, the behavior of interviewer and the tones or pace of questioning, those all are used by the interviewers for a long time, it is not easy to change through some limited training. But normally, these problems can be covered when we select the interviewers by heart.

   Interviewers often face difficulties in:

• Obtaining accurate and truthful responses to relatively closed questions, such as ‘How often?’ or ‘How many?’
• Obtaining full and sincere responses to open ended questions such as ‘How did you feel about X’, ‘Can you tell me what happened when Y?’
• Focusing the interview, that is, getting people to talk about the issues which concern the research.

Almost every researcher want to try their best to have a high quality interview which will be contribute to the whole research. So almost every researchers seek for some suitable interviewers to satisfy the result of interview. There is a dilemma when the researchers to find the suitable interviewers. On one hand, as we all know, interview is the dialogue between two persons, should we look for the interviewers in the same background? Is it easy to communicate with each other? On another hand, or the qualities of interviewers are more important to reach a successful interview? We can through training or other ways to standardize the interviewers. Now let’s discuss it.

Secret questions

    Some questions related to personal or private matters are called secret questions. Usually, we think that some questions involve some personal matters – such as the survey of sexual behaviors – always asked by a same gender interviewer. This kind of opinion is accepted by many fresh researchers in China. But if we think about it carefully, we may have the different answers.

    Objectively speaking, we can find many accoucheurs work in Chinese hospitals are male. Female patients always can tell their state of illness without hesitation or shame. The reasons why there is no need to consider the gender problem happened in asking the secret questions is that in a public interview place, secret matter can be described as a scientific thing.

    Through that example, it is not hard for us to say that where the interview take place will affect the selection of interviewers’ gender. If the interview takes place in a respondent’s home, we should consider it carefully. Because if a woman stay at home alone, normally, she won’t accept a male interviewer to come into her room and ask her some questions about her sexual life. Or even if the interview is going on in an interview room, it also makes a female respondent feel uncomfortable to answer this kind of question. So at that situation – if we need to do some research which may have some secret questions included in it or just the topic seems to be private – we should choose the interviewers restrainedly.

    My attitude towards it is that if we want to ask some questions about sexual life or other likely personally questions, maybe women interviewers will have obviously advantages to interview different respondents. If we interview people in their home, two interviewers may looks safe, especially two women interviewers. “we ought to have women interviewers to interview women” , at this situation, it is right.

Anonymity

    A few days before, many of my friends told me that they all paid their attention to the “China season” in Channel 4. We don’t discuss the content of it. I’m mainly focusing on the methods the journalists collect data in China. After watching one of the piece named “Mao’s Children”, I find that it strange that people are more likely to say something when the interviewers are not belong to a special group – it is to say that the interviewers and the respondents are apart belong to different ethnic group.

    Hyman found that white interviewers received more socially acceptable responses from black respondents than from white respondents. Similarly, black and Oriental interviewers obtained more socially acceptable answers than did white interviewers, with the differences predictably being greatest on questions of race. In fact, as well as race, characteristics such as age, sex, social class, and religion have proven to have an impact for which an allowance has to be made. Socially acceptable responses are particularly likely to represent convenient ways of dealing with interviewers rather than expressing the respondent’s actual view.

    So it is not strange that Chinese people become more and more talkative when they face foreign journalists. It is also true when I do some research with my teacher in my undergraduate study in Shanghai University. The topic we choose is mainly focus on the group live in the lowest level of the whole social structure. In our research, we called them “unequally treated people” (“ruo shi qun ti” in Chinses), includes: disable people, elderly people, the poorest people, and any other potential people live in a struggling situation of Shanghai. Because the report of this research is used for the government, when we do our research, we obtain the support of government. At first, with the guidance of government officials, it is easy for us to enter the interviewees’ home. But there is also a big problem occurs. Every time, government official will fellow one of our research groups to do interview. The family will become restrictive when the group is followed by the government official. So afterwards, the group will go to that family again. Consequently, we can get much more information. It is because that when the official is here, the members of family will reluctant to say the shortcomings of government affairs, they will say something which is social acceptable instead of their actual ideas.

    That is to say, when we do some research related to politics, especially in a politics sensitively country (such as China), we should void to use the interviewers from government. Maybe the interviewer selected from the same country can solve the cultural problem, but that may affect the result of research. Contrarily, interviewers look like different ethnic or race group can get more actual information. That is anonymity, which might have an effect on the social research.

    At this rate, a highly capable interviewer can entirely be competitive in interviewing people of different race, ethnic. At this time, the qualities of the interviewer are more important.

Special problems of interview in the developing countries

    As I mentioned above, there is a huge advantage of using the anonymity in the process of interview, but it is obvious in some field related to the politics or other sensitive questions. There are many special problems of conducting research in the field in the developing countries.

    There is a good case:

    In the Sudan, we found that rural people usually quite freely on such subjects as age and education (except in the case of family size and distribution by sexes). Our interviewees never like to talk about the family size of their families, and they feel very embarrassed when asked about the number of girls they have, their ages etc. In some instances, they may not give the correct family size, being afraid of ‘evil eyes’… The lowest response was to questions about livestock. Farmers never give actual numbers of their animals. They are afraid of the ‘evil eye’ and they are also afraid of taxes, since they have to pay a certain tax for every animal. (Kearl, 1976, P151)

    As we all know the Mazlow's hierarchy of needs. In the developing countries, people are still motivated by the Subsistence needs and safety needs. When we do interviews in those developing countries we should take what the interviewee’s needs for granted. In the case above, if we don’t realize the needs of people in the developing countries, we will not create a dialogue between respondents and interviewers successfully, which will affect the result of research.

    That is to say the background characteristics play an important role in interview. The culture in the developing country is always complicated to understand. The people live in that country live in an occluding surrounding, it also enhance the difficulty for people to realize their culture. At that time, the interviewer and the respondent come from the same culture will be helpful.

Language Use

    Interviews are used as a source for understanding how individuals make sense of their social world and act within it. However, ethno-methodological approaches are interested in interviews as topics in their own right. It is thereby assumed that the link between a person’s account of an action and the action itself cannot be made: it tells the social researcher little about a reality that is ‘external’ to the interview. Instead, an interview is a social encounter like any other.  For this reason, interviews are a topic of social research, not a resource for social research: interview data report not on an external reality displayed in the respondent’s utterances but on the internal reality constructed as both parties contrive to produce the appearances of a recognizable interview. (Sliverman 1985: 165, original emphasis) 

    The focus now moves to the methods that people employ in constructing the interview, not the interview data themselves; as noted above, the use of language as performance.

    Whether the communication is successful or not highly depends on the usage of language. A researcher goes to a country to do some research. The most important problem he will be faced is the problem of language. Even if he invite the translator to help him, it is also hard to express something related to motion and feeling, which plays an important part in the social research.

    If we have the interviewers and respondents with the same background, the problem might diminish.

Summary and Suggestion

Interviewing is not easy. Cohen said that: “like fishing, interviewing is an activity requiring careful preparation, much patience, and considerable practice if the eventual reward is to be worthwhile catch.”

Both interviewers and respondents may be influenced in various indirect ways by the background characteristics of the others. They provide cues to each about the other; for example, if the interviewer is white and the respondent black, the respondent may be influenced in his attitude to the interviewer and his behaviors, and therefore the results will be affected.  The background includes: sex, age, social status, language, etc. Moreover, background characteristics are the source of many attitudes, perception, expectations and motives. If interviewer and respondent are widely divergent in their background characteristics, they are likely to have widely different attitudes and motives which make mutual misunderstanding more likely: “ They constitute a kind of subsoil in which many of an individual’s attitudes, motives and perceptions have direct roots” (Kahn and Cannell, 1957, P183)

However, even the interviewer and the respondent are with the same characteristics, it is still difficult to do an efficient interview. Standardize the interviewer can improve the efficiency of interview.

To begin with, the researcher must ensure that despite the fact that interviewers and respondents each have their own individual personality, history and mannerisms, each interview is standard and identicial. The goal of standardization further requires the interviewer to remain neural and as detached from respondent as possible, whilst stimultaneously maintaining a good rapport.

I can not draw a conclusion that which is more important in the social research. What we can do is that we should try our best to improve the qualities of interviewers. It will be better if we can find the high quality interviewers who have the same background characteristics with the respondents.

While the aims of various interviews are different in various social researches, interviewers in social life are not just topics, but are employed as means of appraisal which may determine life chances. For this reason, researchers might pay more attention to the interviewing practice, as well as what is said and done as a result of the of interview, for the overall purpose of improving our understanding of the social world.

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