The Inter-Vey : towards the conversational survey

For decades, the dilemma between open-ended and closed-ended response alternatives occupied the methodological debate. Over the years, dominant approaches in survey have reacted to this dilemma by opting for fixed response alternatives and the standardization of interviewer’s behavior. If this methodological decision has been the survey’s fortune, making it the methodology most widely used in the social sciences, however it produces a large amount of biases well known in the literature: 1. misunderstanding of the response alternatives by the interviewees (Jordan 1965, Galtung 1967, Marradi 1980-81, Pawson 1982, Amisano and Rinaldi 1988, Gobo 1997); 2. the multiple word meanings of response alternatives due the communicative functions of quantifiers (Simpson 1944, Hakel 1968, Goocher 1965, 1969; Moser and Kalton 1971; Pepper 1981; Hörmann 1983; Newstead and Pollard 1984; Groves 1987, 1989; Bradburn and Miles 1989; Moxey 1990, Schaeffer 1991; Pitrone 1995; Moxey and Sanford 1992, Gobo 1997, 2006) 3. the invented opinions (or lies) phenomenon: (Hartley 1946; Ferber 1956; Selltiz and Jahoda 1963; Converse 1964, 1970; Noelle-Neumann 1970; Schuman and Presser 1981; Schuman and Presser 1983; Schuman and Scott 1987); 4. the influence of the response alternatives on formation of the judgement (Schwarz and Hippler 1987; Clark and Shober, 1992; Schwarz 1999); 5. social desirability effects (Kahn and Cannell 1957; Cronbach 1950; Crowne and Marlowe 1960; Dohrenwend 1966; Oppenheim 1966; Hochstim 1967; Sudman 1967; Phillips and Clancy 1972; Sudman and Bradburn 1973; Blair, Sudman, Bradburn and Stocking 1977; Stefanowska 1979; Bradburn, Sudman and Blair 1979; Schwartz 2000); 6. the yea-saying and response set phenomena (Lentz 1938; Cronbach 1946, 1950; Gage, Leavitt, and Stone 1957; Couch and Keniston 1960; Keniston 1960; Oppenheim 1966; Hamilton 1968; McKennell 1974; Oskamp 1977; Fisher, Weiss and Davis 1968; Bailey 1978; Moun 1988). In order to remedy these biases an alternative proposal can be designed by re-discovering and adapting two “old” proposals: Likert’s technique called “fixed question/free answers” (1940s), and Galtung’s (1967) procedure named “open question/closed answer”. Both procedures are guided by the same discursive principles: make the interview into a conversation, let the interviewee answer freely in his/her own words, and thus release him/her from the researcher’s schemes, making an “interviewee-centered” survey. These principles have been recently blended in an innovative technique for collecting survey data, which has been named “inter-vey” (Gobo and Mauceri 2014), blending in-depth and survey interview (or unstructured & structured interview). “Inter-vey” is based on the idea of the “conversationalzing survey” (Schober and Conrad 1997; Maynard and Schaffer 2002, Gobo 2011). An experimentation (and a procedural example) of this technique will be presented.