The Effects of Dependent Interviewing on Responses to Questions on Income Sources

Peter Lynn, Annette Jäckle (), Stephen Jenkins and Emanuela Sala

No 487, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Using an experimental design, we compare two alternative approaches to dependent interviewing (proactive and reactive) with traditional independent interviewing on a module of questions about sources of income. We believe this to be the first large-scale quantitative comparison of proactive and reactive dependent interviewing. The three approaches to questioning are compared in terms of their impact on under-reporting of income sources and related bivariate statistics. The study design also enables identification of the characteristics of respondents whose responses are sensitive to the mode of interviewing. We conclude that under-reporting can be significantly greater with independent interviewing than with either form of dependent interviewing, especially for income sources that are relatively common or relatively easy to forget. We find that dependent interviewing is particularly helpful as a recall aid for respondents below retirement age and registered disabled persons.

Pages: II, 35 p.
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.43283.de/dp487.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The effects of dependent interviewing on responses to questions on income sources (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp487

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().