Abstract:

The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of centralised telephone interviewing, in particular in comparison with conventional decentralised personal interviewing. Centralised telephone interviewing provides real benefits in terms of quality control, easily replicated and accurate sampling, speed and flexibility, but suffers from a number of perceived disadvantages with regard to respondent cooperation, interview length and design, and the non-representativity of telephone samples. The paper describes experimental studies and other practical experience that demonstrate that most of these perceived disadvantages are without practical foundation.