As a result of attention to race-based health disparities, research on African American health has increased in the past few decades. However, the ability to quantify and modify health status among African Americans is constrained by error associated with available assessment methods. Some sources of measurement error are well understood, but others, such as the impact of interviewer characteristics on survey data, require additional investigation. The effect of interviewer race upon survey data has been explored to some extent in face-to-face interviewing, but to a much lesser extent in telephone surveys. This study will explore how African American telephone interviewers' ethnic identities and use of culturally associated linguistic features impact several aspects of respondent behavior; such as responses to racially topical survey items, responses to self-reported health survey items, interviewer race preferences, satisfaction with interviewers, responses to a culturally tailored health program, and program satisfaction. Female African American telephone interviewers will be recruited to complete a self-administered, written survey measuring their ethnic identity types and sociodemographic characteristics. Each participating interviewer also will administer a digitally recorded telephone survey with each of three standardized respondents with differing ethnic identity types and speech characteristics. The digital recordings will be assessed using a linguistic coding system measuring the extent to which interviewers and respondents use phonological, syntactic, and discourse features associated with African American English (AAE). Analyses will be conducted to see whether AAE features are used more frequently by interviewers with certain identity types, during surveys with respondents of certain identity types, or around racially topical parts of the interview script. These data will be used to form a proxy variable for perceived interviewer ethnic identity in order to compare and contrast the impact of perceived versus actual interviewer identity in surveys conducted as part of a health study with 500 African American adults in Atlanta and Detroit. The impact of interviewer-respondent ethnic identity concordance and discordance also will be explored.
This research will advance the intellectual understanding of how interviewers and respondents may reflexively impact the expression of ethnic verbal patterns in the context of telephone surveys. The study is the first known investigation of the influence of ethnic identity on survey data, African American respondent's preferences for interviewer race, African American respondents' ratings of African American telephone interviewers, or the effects of culturally associated linguistic patterns on survey data. The study also may result in several broader impacts. For one, this study involves a multidisciplinary approach that draws from the fields of public health, survey methodology, linguistics, and psychology and could lead to new, cross-disciplinary linguistic coding methodologies for use in behavioral, linguistic, and survey research. The research may improve the quality of survey data by providing an evidence-based rationale for or against race-matching in telephone health surveys with African American respondents. These findings may also bear on the hiring of appropriate staff for public health programs and provide guidance for survey administration with other racially or culturally defined populations. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
