Abstract:

The examples given here: the Irish readership survey, the family Interview for consumer durables, the 7-day aided recall survey, the cigarette study, have a common philosophy. The techniques respect both the respondent and the interviewer. They accept that the respondent has the truth inside him and is willing to divulge it. But it is not an easy thing for him to do. The researcher and his interviewing team have to help him do so. To this end they have to: a) adjust their approach to evoke maximum respondent co-operation; b) give the respondent a feeling of confidence and of competence in all that is required of him; c) solve the problem of communicating exactly what is required of the respondent; to introduce a learning process; d) solve the problem of enabling the respondent to answer without ambiguity and in a way that obliges the respondent and not the interviewer to allocate the answers; e) establish the pattern or configuration of events - to reconstruct.