Improving Data Quality with Sociodemographic Matching?: About the Effects and Implications of Age and Gender Matching in Face-to-Face Interviews

Abstract

According to the theory of liking, data quality might be improved in face-to-face survey settings when there is a high degree of similarity between respondents and interviewers, for example, with regard to gender or age. Using two rounds of European Social Survey data from 25 countries including more than 70,000 respondents, this concept is tested for the dependent variables amount of item nonresponse, reluctance to answer, and the probability that a third adult person is interfering with the interview. The match between respondents and interviewers is operationalized using the variables age and gender and their statistical interactions to analyze how this relates to the outcomes. While previous studies can be corroborated, overall effect sizes are small. In general, item nonresponse is lower when a male interviewer is conducting the interview. For reluctance, there are no matching effects at all. Regarding the presence of other adults, only female respondents profit from a gender match, while age is without any effect. The results indicate that future surveys should weigh the costs and benefits of sociodemographic matching as advantages are probably small.

What can Interviewer-Collected Paradata Tell About Measurement Quality in Face-to-Face Surveys? Analyzing Response Styles in six Rounds of the European Social Survey

“…Similarly, Bittmann (2022) showed that age matching had no effect on item nonresponse or reluctance to answer survey questions but found that gender matching was associated with a reduction in item nonresponse (only in male participants). Comparable results were obtained by Vercruyssen, Wuyts and Loosveldt (2017), who found that gender matching was related to fewer refusals in female participants and fewer item nonresponses in male participants.…”

“…In the face-to-face mode, response bias is not purely the function of respondents; it is also the function of interviewers' characteristics and behaviors (Dijkstra 1987;Klausch, Hox and Schouten 2013). Interviewers' sociodemographic traits (e.g., age and gender) and work-related traits (e.g., workload and experience), as well as the match of these traits to various respondent characteristics, can impact survey results, including the presence of RS (e.g., Beullens and Loosveldt 2016;Bittmann 2022;Życzyńska-Ciołek and Kołczyńska 2020).…”