Constructing Survey Data: An Interactional Approach

Citation

Clare Mumford (2015), "Constructing Survey Data: An Interactional Approach", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 294-295. https://doi.org/10.1108/QROM-06-2015-1296

It was the title of this book that attracted my attention, by proposing a novel twist – an interactional approach – to survey research. While the authors’ arguments about the importance of attending to social interactional processes in data generation are likely to be well-known to many qualitative researchers, two categories of reader may find this book of particular interest. The first category are those who (unlike me) already have some knowledge of quantitative research, and who want to delve more deeply into the issues of survey data, especially for mixed methods research. The book provides lots of operational support and guidance that will sensitize interviewers to ideas about data co-construction and social interaction. Second, those involved in teaching research methods will find it useful for highlighting these same issues to their students. The book offers great material for developing into interactive learning sessions. Below I provide a short summary of the book’s main argument, its structure, and what it offers particularly as a practical teaching resource.

The authors promote an interviewee-centred approach to surveys, administered in face-to-face settings, in which interviewers can deviate from a script, in order to assist and check the interpretation of questions and answers. Gobo and Mauceri propose that lessons that have been forgotten from survey research conducted in the 1930s and 1940s, when this interviewee-centred approach was used, are worthwhile recalling in order to improve the quality of survey data nowadays. After a short summary introduction, the two chapters constituting Part I provide the historical context for their argument. Chapter 1 delivers a very interesting perspective on the development of the survey from the nineteenth century onwards, that sets out the claim that the survey and the in-depth interview have common historical roots, and have been separated as quantitative and qualitative methods only relatively recently. Chapter 2 deals with a particular approach called the Multilevel Integrated Survey Approach (MISA), as promoted by the researcher Paul Lazarsfeld at the Bureau of Applied Social Research in the USA from the 1940s. The relative merits of the MISA are compared and contrasted to the Standardised Survey Approach (SSA). I found this chapter rather hard to follow, and suspect that readers with more experience and knowledge of quantitative methods would be able to engage more productively with the arguments than I did. I just ended up wondering whether Lazarsfeld, if he were conducting research now, would still be using MISA and for what purposes, and why the authors were not simply acknowledging other qualitative approaches as a remedy to the problems they identified for the SSA.

However, the chapters in Part II, entitled “From Questions to Answers”, are a compelling read which both undergraduate and postgraduate students are likely to find easy to follow. Chapter 3 (entitled “The answering process”) illustrates some problematic issues in how data are constructed, and provides some brief guiding principles about how to choose between different technological modes for survey administration, including telephone and online, to suit the research design. Chapter 4 (“Asking and questioning”) discusses the implications of wording and types of question in more detail. Chapter 5 (“Answers: cognitive processes”) concentrates on how constraints in a questionnaire’s response alternatives can have cognitive effects which influence the answer chosen, and how particular situated meanings may be generated due to pragmatic and semantic misunderstandings in the interview situation. Chapter 6 (“Communicative processes”) addresses other interactional features such as the effects of temporary psychological states, social conventions, socio-demographic characteristics of interviewer and interviewee, and the physical nature of the setting. Chapter 7 (“The living questionnaire”) covers the dynamic nature of the questionnaire within the process of social interaction during its administration.

Part III deals with answer comparability across interviewees, with Chapter 8 comparing the SSA, which aims for consistency in the question stimuli, to an interactional approach, which aims for consistency in the response through a more active process of conversational dialogue between interviewer and interviewee. Chapter 9 discusses training needs in order to conduct interactional surveys well.

Part IV is particularly useful from a mixed methods perspective. Chapter 10 considers the definition of quality, for data quality (in the process of answer co-construction), and survey quality (the quality of the overall findings). Chapter 11 discusses mixed methods and offers some thoughts about how qualitative procedures may be incorporated into survey designs. Chapter 12 covers pretesting strategies, to pursue data quality before the main survey administration, and Chapter 13 covers deviant case analysis as a response for data quality after the data have been collected.

Finally, Part V’s sole chapter, Chapter 14 (“Glocalizing the survey”), discusses the potential future for the survey, cross-cultural lessons learnt, and potential moves towards multicultural and decolonializing processes.

The book’s message, as a stand-alone learning exercise, somewhat failed for me personally, since I was hoping (perhaps unreasonably) for some clearer discussion of both the opportunities and limitations for the type of survey approach the authors are recommending. For instance, the authors’ coverage of intersubjectivity is used in order to argue for methods to reduce bias in survey data quality, rather than to position surveys as one tool among many for different types of research question. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading the book. The chapters are well-written, well-presented, and contain very entertaining examples – some of which made me laugh out loud – of the issues, problems, and different operational uses of survey research across countries, cultures, and languages. It has excellent practical advice for questionnaire and interview design, and a great range of further reading suggestions at the end of each chapter. The book therefore makes an invaluable teaching aid for discussing survey research, particularly in a classroom setting where some of the questions it raised for me could be debated and discussed further, and perhaps for pointing out that qualitative methods can sometimes offer alternative options to the problems with survey data that the authors raise.