Telephone interview
A telephone interview is a research interview held over a phone call, used both for structured survey questionnaires and for in-depth qualitative interviews. Interviewer and participant can hear each other but not see each other, which separates it from video and face-to-face interviews.
How it works
In survey research, a trained interviewer reads a fixed questionnaire over the phone; the US National Alcohol Survey, for example, is a national telephone-based household survey. In qualitative research, the interviewer follows a discussion guide as in any in-depth interview. Facial expressions and body language are lost, so the interviewer listens for what voice and intonation carry instead.
Direct comparisons of the two modes are few. Irvine and colleagues found phone interviews somewhat shorter than in-person ones, while other studies found no difference in length, depth or type of response. A phone call can feel more anonymous, which may suit sensitive topics, and it reaches participants across a wide area. Novick's review found no evidence that phone interviews produce lower-quality data.
A worked example
Over one week, a state tax agency's service team phones 24 small-business owners about a new quarterly filing form, 30 minutes each, across 12 counties. Ten of the 24, about 42 percent, say they paid a preparer the first time because the instructions confused them. The team rewrites the instructions before the next quarter's filing date.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
A qualitative telephone interview carries the voice but loses the face, and a Pulse interview can keep both, the voice in its recording and the participant's reactions on screen in video insights.