Miejsce prowadzenia wywiadu i jego oddziaływanie
Abstract
Researchers in Poland give to interviewers a considerable range of freedom in the selection of places where interviews are performed. In consequence, informations are frequently obtained from respondents under widely diversified conditions and in various places, which fact is not taken into account in the substantive elaboration of the problems studied. The author attempts to answer the question: does the place of interviewing influence the two partners of the encounter, i.e. the interviewer and the respondent and, especially, does it influence the contents of the answers given by the latter.
Secondary analysis of materials from various surveys was done. Analysed were: 3568 various questionnaires filled in by interviewers and 632 questionnaires from the survey on cultural consumption of intelligentsia in the city of Łódź in 1966, as well as numerous utterances of interviewers.
By the place of an interview is understood the nearest surrounding in which the encounter between an interviewer and a respondent occurs. The following kinds of interviewing places have been distinguished: (1) respondent’s home, (2) respondent’s place of work, (3) cafe, restaurant, bar etc., (4) park, garden, street, backyard, meadow – or any other place without an immediate limiting boundary.
The place of interviewing influences the persons involved in two ways: (1) through its appearance, or external conditions under which the encounter takes place, (2) through the social roles in which act the respondents in a given place. Seven factors related to the external conditions and influencing the two partners in an interview were discussed. It has been ascertained that most of these factors exert a much stronger influence upon the interviewer than upon the respondent. This is so because for an interviewer the respondent’s home or working place is an alien place to which he must adapt himself to be able to do an interview well. The influence of various places upon respondents is related to such traits as their sex or occupational position, because, depending on these traits, they act in the presence of interviewers in various social roles (official or private ones, etc.).
The materials from over a dozen of surveys were analysed and the finding was that 80% of interviews took place at respondents’ homes, 17% in their working places, 3% in cafes and parks. Among the interviews performed at homes, some 54 took place in rooms and the rest in kitchens. On the basis of the analysis of instructions for interviewers as well as procedures used in several surveys it was found that the place of interviewing constitutes an element of social situation of interview that can be programmed by the researcher who is in a position to require from his interviewers to perform all the interviews in the prescribed places.
There are clear relationships between certain places of interviewing and certain categories of third persons: (1) at respondents’ homes third persons are most often the family members; in the places of work-people unrelated to respondents, (2) in general, the percentage of third persons at homes is nearly the same as that of persons accompanying respondents in their work places, (3) in the work places the average number of third persons present is higher than at homes, (4) at homes, third persons interfere with answers of respondents more often than in work places.
Relationships between various socio-demographic traits of respondents and their choice of the place of interviewing were also ascertained: the strongest relationship exists between that place and the occupation of respondent.
Physicians and office workers were making most often their appointments with interviewers at homes; engineers and teachers in work places; journalists – in cafés.
Statistical analysis of the influence of interviewing places upon the answers to 9 selected questions has revealed that in general, respondents had a tendency to show off as people consuming all kinds of “cultural goods”. This tendency was most pronounced in cafes, less – at homes, and least marked in work places. To eliminate spurious correlations, test traits such as sex, age, occupation of respondents and third persons present were used in the analysis; Q coefficient as well as Lazarsfeld’s formula were applied.
The influence of the place of interviewing upon respondents’ answers concerning their cultural consumption is related to three groups of factors: (1) external appearance of the place (e.g. books at home facilitate respondents’ answers concerning their reading, mobilize their memory, etc.), (2) eventual presence of third persons (their help, control or "confusing” influence), (3) social roles in which in various places, acts a respondent (e.g. in an institution he may act in some professional role, such as that of a manager, etc. – at home in the role of a family member, etc.).
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