ABSTRACT

Face-to-face interviews between investigator and respondent have a long history in survey research as a more interactive alternative to written survey presentation. Most notable in the speech domain has been the increasing use of telephone interviews. This raises the important question of how the features of natural speech and the cognitive load required for on-line speech comprehension may affect elderly respondents in survey research. As Knäuper notes in Chapter 17 of this volume, in telephone surveys the respondent is the captive of the speech rate of the telephone interviewer. This is true both in the rate at which questions are read and, when alternatives are used, in the rate at which these are presented. This fact adds the additional dimension of processing speed to the usual issues of comprehending questions in survey research.