Interviewing

A Short History Of Interviewing

Survey interviewing, or its equivalent, has been conducted for thousands of years, from ancient times when rulers sent out census takers to gather information about the people they found (in households or elsewhere), including the gender and age of each person. Businesses have long queried their customers and clients about products and services. In the 1930s and 1940s, U.S. government agencies began conducting many more surveys than before. As before, the interviews were conducted using paper questionnaires. This was called PAPI, for paper-and-pencil interviewing. At that time almost all interviewing was conducted face-to-face.

In the United States, telephone interviewing became popular in the 1960s, because by that time most households in the country had telephones. (This was not the case in Europe and other developed countries, where private telephones were very expensive and could take months to get installed.) However, face-to-face interviewing was still used for long, complicated surveys and those that required visual aids or physical tasks such as card sorting.

While large main-frame computers had been used for decades for survey data processing, it was not until the widespread availability of minicomputers—later called personal computers (PCs)—in the late 1970s and early 1980s that interviewing became computerized. Thus computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) was born. Later, when laptop computers were created and became affordable, computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) became common. (At this point, European surveyors took the lead with this technology, having skipped over CATI because of lower residential telephone coverage.)

As more respondents became familiar with them, computers were used for computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI). Respondents often need assistance with how to answer computerized questionnaires, so typically an interviewer plays the role of instructor. With the introduction of a sound component, audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) became possible. It is primarily used to (a) ask sensitive questions that a respondent might not want to answer to an interviewer, (b) ask questions in languages other than the one or two used on the written questionnaire, or (c) offer an oral version of a questionnaire to a respondent who cannot read well.

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