ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the dynamics of interviewer–respondent interaction in a corpus of 634 US-based interviews on smartphones. The Human Voice and Human Text interviews were carried out using a custom CATI interface that supported voice and text interviews. The Automated Text interviews were carried out via a custom text dialogue system, and the interface for respondents was the same as that for Human Text interviews. Respondents only ever produced fillers (ums and uhs) or gave synonyms of response options in voice interviews, and in both cases more with human than automated interviewers. Text interviews are more streamlined, with far less small talk, commentary, or deviation from the interview script. The text interviews have quite different dynamics than voice interviews on the same device: they take longer overall but with fewer turns of interaction – allowing respondents to answer when convenient for them and while multitasking, which a number of respondents report finding preferable.
