Survey data are used in many disciplines from Social Sciences to Economics. But might interviewers’ behaviour affect the quality of such data? This book presents the results of new research on interviewers’ motivation and behaviour. A number of contributions address deviant behaviour and methods for assessing the impact of such behaviour on data.

Peter Winker is professor of statistics and econometrics at the University Gießen. Natalja Menold is a senior researcher at the Center for Survey Design & Methodology at the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Mannheim. Rolf Porst was a senior researcher at the Center for Survey Design & Methodology at the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Mannheim until he retired in 2012.

Contents: Sebastian Bredl/Nina Storfinger/Natalja Menold: A Literature Review of Methods to Detect Fabricated Survey Data – Natalja Menold/Peter Winker/Nina Storfinger/Christoph J. Kemper: A Method for Ex-Post Identification of Falsifications in Survey Data – Nina Storfinger/Peter Winker: Assessing the Performance of Clustering Methods in Falsification Identification using Bootstrap – Jörg Blasius/Victor Thiessen: Detecting Poorly Conducted Interviews – Birgit Jesske: Concepts and Practices in Interviewer Qualification and Monitoring – Oliver Hülser: Automatic Interview Control of Market Research Studies – Natascha Massing/Daniela Ackermann/Silke Martin/Anouk Zabal/Beatrice Rammstedt: Controlling Interviewers’ Work in PIAAC - the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies – Ana Slavec/Vasja Vehovar: Detecting Interviewer’s Deviant Behavior in the Slovenian National Readership Survey – Josef Brüderl/Bernadette Huyer-May/Claudia Schmiedeberg: Interviewer Behavior and the Quality of Social Network Data – Natalja Menold/Marie Kristin Opper: Interviewer Experience and «Quality» of Falsified Data – Marieke Haan/Yfke Ongena/Mike Huiskes: Interviewers’ Question: Rewording Not Always a Bad Thing – Patricia A. Gwartney: Mischief versus Mistakes: Motivating Interviewers to Not Deviate – Matthias Ziegler/Christoph J. Kemper: Extreme Response Style and Faking: Two Sides of the Same Coin?