Devyatko I.F. Developing an approach to multimodal quantitative assessment of interviewers’ cognitive load: first results of a field quasi experiment. RUDN Journal of Sociology, 2018, 18 (4), 627—637.

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: http://journals.rudn.ru/sociology/article/view/19745 (дата обращения 23.11.2018)

Abstract

The belief that survey research instruments mediating communication between interviewer and respondent influence the quality of data obtained in the process of survey interview, has become a conventional methodological wisdom long ago. However, the impact of the cognitive load experienced by the interviewer on the quality of data in the interview process has not yet been systematically examined to a comparable extent. In the situation when a questionnaire is filled up by an interviewer it is the latter who primarily has to allocate limited individual resources of attention, memory, visual and motor control, active listening and interpretation in order to minimize misunderstandings of the question on the respondent’s side and errors of the answers’ fixation on the interviewer's own side. Nevertheless, among various methods of pre-testing or evaluating survey mode effects and assessing instruments’ quality, the methods of multimodal quantitative estimation of instrument-related cognitive load experienced by interviewers during the interview are still rare or lacking. The current article presents: 1) a brief inventory of subjective, behavioral and physiological measures of the cognitive load, employed in such disciplinary fields as cognitive science, ergonomics, etc., and 2) a discussion of preliminary findings from a field quasi-experiment which was conducted among The Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey interviewers during the first stage of transition to CAPI mode. The findings demonstrate some possibilities and limitations of the parallel employment of a version of the cognitive load rating scale developed by F. Paas and a simple physiological measure (heart rate) supplemented with a background screen video capture from Android-based tablets used for CAPI interviews for the purposes of multimodal quantitative evaluation and optimization of the interviewer’s cognitive load during the interview process.