Equal Interview Time Eliminates Interviewers’ Bias

Question 36

Equal Interview Time Eliminates

a. Berkesonian bias

b. Recall bias

c. Selection bias

d. Interviewer’s Bias

Answer

d. Interviewers’ Bias

Reference

Park 18th Edition Page 67

QTDF

Park

Quality

Reader

Status

Repeat

Discussion

Interviewer bias is the intentional or unintentional prompting by a marketing researcher, which affects the interviewee's response during oral surveys (e.g. personal, face-to-face or telephone interviews). This may lead to distorted results caused for example through (over-) politeness, social acceptability or conflict avoidance.

Explanation

Bias may also occur when interviewer knows the hypothesis and also knows who the cases are. This prior information may lead him to question the cases more thoroughly than controls regarding a positive history of the suspected causal factor. A useful check on this kind of bias can be made by noting the length of time taken to interview the average case and average control.

Comments

In statistics, the term bias is used for describing several different concepts:

Ä     A biased sample is one in which some members of the population are more likely to be included than others.

Ä     The bias of an estimator is the difference between an estimator's expectation and the true value of the parameter being estimated.

Ä     Systematic bias and systemic bias are external influences that may affect the accuracy of statistical measurements.

Tips

Interviewers bias can also be eliminated by double blinding