Surveying Illiterate Individuals: Are Audio Files in Computer-Assisted Self-Interviews a Useful Supportive Tool?

Abstract

This chapter focuses on specific challenges to surveying newly arrived immigrants with a focus on refugees. In addition to the need to provide interviews for immigrants in their native language, it must be taken into account that a considerable proportion of this group has poor or no reading skills in their native language. Two strategies can be used to avoid systematically excluding this population: offering interviews with native-speaking interviewers or using computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI) with additional audio files that enable respondents to listen to a questionnaire. We discuss the pros and cons of both strategies. Subsequently, using the data from the first wave of the German refugee study ReGES, in which both strategies were offered as a combined approach, we consider their effectiveness and practicability in more detail. Although native-speaking interviewers can increase cooperation and help to not exclude illiterate individuals, they also can encourage a higher social desirability bias. However, illiterate interviewees are more likely to take advantage of the interviewer’s support to read the questions aloud than to use the audio files. Nevertheless, we also found that a small but substantial subgroup of interviewees with little or no reading skills used the audio files often.

Data from the Panel Study ‘Refugees in the German Educational System (ReGES)’

“…Since a relevant proportion of illiterates was assumed to be among the group of refugees who immigrated in the mid-2010s, audio files were implemented in the self-administered parts of the survey in Wave 1, so that people with little reading ability could also take part (see Gentile et al, 2019). However, due to the low use of audio files (see Heinritz et al, 2022), audio files were no longer used in the subsequent waves.…”