Standardization-in-Interaction: The Survey Interview
Douglas W. Maynard, Nora Cate Schaeffer · 2006
The survey interview as a form of social scientific research is ubiquitous almost beyond comprehension. Its use spans disciplines (especially psychology, political science, and sociology), national boundaries, government and business organizations, public and private sectors, and so on. In addition to its information-gathering function, it is a tool for administering and governing society—in the U.S., for example, officials conduct the national census using a form of the survey interview, and the Current Population Survey, by which the government ascertains employment figures on a monthly basis, is a tool for forging economic policy. Most generally, the survey interview is a means for measuring demographic characteristics and aggregate attitudes and opinions in many societies and sub-societies around the world. Surveys do this in a systematic way: sampling a population and then using standardized measurement in order to estimate various characteristics of it. Over the years both practitioners and critics of standardized surveys have considered how the fundamentally social nature of the interview affects the data. Critics have presented examples of the awkward, or even bizarre, interactions that sometimes occur in survey interviews as evidence that the resulting data cannot be valid. Practitioners (Kahn and Cannell 1957), on the