Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13.0 HOUSEHOLD SURVEY TRAINING APPROACHES AND PRIORITIES

Note: Significant components of this chapter come from Chapter 3 of the NCHRP Report. Material has been reviewed and updated by Mark Freedman and Heather Contrino, with further review by Bhuvan Eshwar.

Regardless of the level of effort that the survey team puts into the household travel/activity survey design, the success of the project is ultimately up to the interviewers and survey office staff who actually implement the effort. If survey workers are unprepared for the work, the survey will suffer in terms of schedule, budget, and quality. Following the convention established in Chapter 2.0, we define two tasks for the preparation task, training and briefing. Training involves teaching workers their jobs or refreshing their memories about the basic aspects of their jobs. Briefing involves teaching workers about the nature of the particular household travel/activity survey, and going over specific issues related to this job.

The two broad issues related to training and briefing workers to conduct household travel/activity surveys are listed in the section summary. This section briefly describes these issues.

13.1 Training and Briefing Topics

Since household travel/activity surveys generally involve mail surveys, telephone surveys, or most likely both, the survey workers who will need to be trained and briefed include telephone interviewers and survey office workers.

13.1.1 Training Topics for Telephone Interviews

The goal of the telephone interviewer training sessions is to bring the basic skill levels of interviewers up to the point where they can consistently perform their jobs well. For professional interviewers, the topics covered will be ones they have heard before. However, given the interviewers’ importance in the survey process, it is most certainly worth reviewing good practices, and preventing the development of bad habits.

The following topics should be addressed:

• Basic Survey Research Principles – Why interviewing people is a useful and accurate way to obtain information;
• Importance of Quality Interviewing – How interviewers can contribute to survey bias, and the difficulty (impossibility) of correcting these problems;
• Respondent Motives – How and why respondents evade questions or fail to provide the truth, and how the interviewer can help to reduce these problems (and how interviewers can inadvertently make them worse);
• The Importance of Consistency Between Interviewers – How to be a “standardized” interviewer, not too detached, not too enthusiastic;
• Ways for Handling Refusals – How to be, and the importance of being both polite and persuasive;
• Productivity Expectations – Quality and quantity of interview data expected from them, and their refusal rate;
• Supervision – How they will be monitored, and where they can find help;
• Interview Scripts – Conventions used on the written or computerized questionnaire;
• Recording Data – Where and how to enter data;
• CATI Procedures – How to run a computerized system, and what to do if problems are encountered (CATI surveys);
• Progress Forms – Procedures for completing tally sheets (PAPI surveys); and
• Employment Considerations – Interviewer pay and benefits, as well as other administrative procedures, like timesheets.

13.1.2 Briefing Topics for Telephone Interviewers

The briefing session for telephone interviewers should address each of the topics listed in Chapter 2.0, as well as more specific telephone interviewing issues. The briefing should include:

• Purpose of the Survey – Including sponsorship, analysis goals, expected uses of the survey data;
• Description of Sampling Approach – Respondents sometimes ask about how they were selected;
• Use of the Call Sheet or CATI Calling Procedures – How interviewers will record which numbers have been tried, and which need to be tried;
• Introductory Language and Screening Questions – How interviewers begin the call;
• Details About Specific Questions – Why the questions are being asked, and why they are worded as they are;
• “Fallback” Statements – Standard replies for likely respondent questions;
• Assurance of Confidentiality – Specific steps being taken to assure respondent confidentiality; and
• Editing Completed Interviews – What to check and verify on the survey forms to ensure completeness.

13.1.3 Training and Briefing Topics for Mail Survey Office Workers

None of the tasks related to implementing mail surveys are likely to be very difficult for people with clerical or administrative experience, but the nature of the survey work requires that staff be particularly good planners. The mail survey office worker needs to consistently know what he or she needs to do next, and what to do after that, because deadlines of various types creep up quickly once the survey process is underway.

Therefore, the key training and briefing topic for mail survey office workers is to develop within each worker a detailed understanding of all the mail survey steps, and the amount of time and effort required in each task.

13.2 Conducting the Training and Briefing

13.2.1 Training and Briefing Session for Telephone Interviewers

Typically, for previously trained telephone interviewers, the training and briefing sessions can be combined. The sessions generally consist of four elements:

• Training lecture by survey manager;
• Review of the household travel/activity survey by a representative of the survey-sponsoring agency;
• Formal review of the questionnaire; and
• Role-playing and practice interviews.

Most training procedures are presented to interviewers by the survey manager. Next, the interviewers are told about the household travel/ activity survey. It is usually very effective to have a survey team member or a staff member from the sponsoring agency lead this discussion because it demonstrates to interviewers how important the survey is to the sponsor, and the personal contact motivates the interviewer.

The third element of the training/briefing session is a detailed walk-through of the questionnaire. To perform this, many recent survey teams have prepared interviewer manuals which can be used as references by interviewers once the training/briefing session is completed. These recent documents are likely to be extremely useful to new survey teams. An example manual from a recent Tucson telephone-mail-telephone survey is presented in Appendix E of this manual. Survey teams should consider contacting the sponsors of previous household surveys that employed similar methods to the ones the team envisions for copies of their interviewer manuals.

The final part of the session is used to have interviewers practice with each other and/or with supervisors. All interviewers need to go through the entire survey two or three times before actually beginning the interviews. One way of helping interviewers is to record their “role play” interviews and to ask them to identify ways in which they could improve.

13.2.2 Training and Briefing Session for Mail Survey Office Workers

The briefing session for office staff involves presenting them with detailed descriptions and schedules of tasks. Office workers should be shown the likely “deadline crunches,” and the importance of the many identified deadlines.