Pain-free mall intercepts

Editor's note: E. B. Feltser is a freelance writer based in San Diego who has worked as a marketing research interviewer and survey writer.

Mall intercept interviewing has much in common with snake charming. Successful practitioners beguile 'em to get things started, keep 'em interested with smooth moves and lots of eye contact, and stay in control at all times. But a snake charmer only has to intrigue a snake that, frankly, hasn't got a lot of pressing business elsewhere. Interviewers deal with respondents who have a whole heap of other things to do, and an interviewer's only tools are personal delivery and the words of the questionnaire. Anything about the questionnaire that messes up smooth delivery runs the risk of undergoing interviewer "improvements" that might seriously affect the study design.

The solution is simple: make sure the questionnaire is user-friendly. The first user is the interviewer, and taking that viewpoint into consideration when writing a questionnaire can strengthen the survey. But some questionnaires seem to lack any firm feel for the actual, physical act of intercept interviewing and tend to impede rather than facilitate the interview process. In an attempt to strike a blow for intercept interviewers everywhere, I've discussed some of the more common problems below.

First, a reality check

The economics of mall intercept interviewing being what they are, it is expedient for interviewers to sally forth with several jobs on the clipboard simultaneously, in the expectation that a contact will qualify for at least one of the surveys. A clipboard with five jobs of four pages each means the interviewer has 20 pages to riffle through when looking for that one questionnaire. That's not counting display cards and other bits and pieces. And, typically, most of those pages are white, letter-size sheets.

Why not make your questionnaire distinctive? Use colored paper, or even just a colored top sheet. This will allow the interviewer to flip to it with professional smoothness. Incidentally, if you are one of the dwindling group that still uses both sides of the paper, please, please stop doing it. If you wonder why, clip a two-sided questionnaire into the middle of 15 other pieces of paper, flip to it, and try to do the interview without disrupting everything on the clipboard and looking like a fumbling dork.

The approach

Most mall interviewers fudge the intro in order to appeal to the individual potential respondent (the beguile factor at work!). Even so, the approach has to deal with predictable respondent questions: What's this about? Are you giving anything away? How long will this take? A well-written intro includes answers to these questions, at whatever level is appropriate. The topic, however, should be fairly specific: opinions about housewares, about politics, about personal care products. If those answers don't come from the questionnaire writer, they'll come from the interviewer, because not answering them makes the interviewer seem evasive (the beguile factor down in flames!).

Ignore that man behind the screen . . .

Okay, you've hooked a potential respondent in the mall, and the Intercept Two-Step has begun. This little ballet consists of the respondent sidling around so he or she can read the screener while you, well-trained interviewer that you are, maneuver yourself and the clipboard around to keep the screener safe from eager eyes. The screener is not always an ally in the effort. Far too often, all those confidential instructions and term points are printed in big, black, bold type that is as attention-grabbing as chocolate cake is to a dieter. Why such alluring bold-face type is preferred is a minor mystery. Perhaps it's to differentiate instructions from questions, although light-face type in parentheses works just as well. Maybe it's just tradition. Whatever the rationale, boldface is an unnecessary embellishment.

Hitting the bull's-eye

Interviewers often get confused by the hidden assumptions lurking in screeners, especially slightly quaint assumptions about the family of the '90's. A prime example is the imprecision about family and household. When an interviewer asks, "Does anyone in your family work for . . ." and the respondent starts ticking off far-flung relatives ("Well, I think one of my cousins works for an ad agency in Sao Paulo, and . . ."), where does the interviewer draw the line? Even the old standard "Does anyone in your household work for . . ." gets tricky, given the friendly-divorce-with-visitation figures. It's helpful when the line is crystal clear:

"Does anyone in your immediate family or do any close friends work for . . ." A related assumption is that the female head-of-household does most of the shopping. Interviewing experience confirms that as the number of two- or three-job families and single-parent households has grown, shopping duty has also shifted. Wives often claim that their husbands share at least equally in the shopping duties, and in many households, particularly ethnic ones, another, often older, woman tends the household for the working parents. Interviewers get downright grumpy when they have to terminate a willing primary shopper who doesn't happen to be the designated FHH required by the survey. If the survey really targets primary shoppers, why limit things by specifying family status or sexual persuasion? It's surprising how many respondents comment on how outmoded and even sexist such assumptions are, given this brave new world.

The endless screener

The border between screener and questionnaire proper gets pretty blurry now and then, particularly in two-stage studies where respondents do the in-depth part back in the field office. The desire to wring every last bit of data from every contact is understandable. But consider the fancy footwork you'd need in order to keep a respondent happy and eager while you explain that the last six or seven minutes of questions was only the beginning and now there's lots more awaiting them back at the ranch ("More? I thought I just did your survey!"). Keep the screener part of two-parters targeted and compact, no more than a couple of pages, with the invitation immediately following it. A short, snappy screener always increases the odds that qualified contacts will hang in there to the end. Besides, they can always answer all those other "screener" questions once they're sitting comfortably in the field office. And if you really can't bear to let the not-quite-qualified contacts go unquestioned, just skip over the invitation, and ask away.

Skip patterns

The essence of successful mall interviewing is speed and efficiency. Experienced interviewers handle normal skip patterns easily, but they all have war stories. One outstanding example required interviewers to assign numerical values to responses, adding them here, subtracting them there, to determine whether the respondent qualified for the study. More common, but no less horrifying, are questionnaires with several instructions that say something like, "If respondent answered yes to Q. 4 and Q. 12b, ask Q. 23a; If respondent answered no to Q. 7, Q. 15, and Q. 16a or Q. 16b, ask Q. 23b." Skips that force an interviewer to move back and forth through the questionnaire pages not only make it easy to make mistakes, they also take time and let the respondent get bored and decide that going for a pizza would be more fun. Try to keep your skip patterns straightforward. And, if there's no way to simplify a skip pattern, why not repeat the relevant question numbers in boldface type at the bottom of their pages, so the interviewer can find them easily? Think ergonomically!

Keeping the tally

Keeping an accurate incidence tally of how many would-be respondents term out where, and perhaps how many initial refusals the interviewer has to suffer through before somebody finally qualifies is an important housekeeping task. Important, but often neglected by survey creators. When the screener lacks a built-in tallying system, the interviewer has to make do with a separate tally sheet, which usually means searching for it through all those other pages on the clipboard. It's not unknown for interviewers to get caught up in the thrill of the hunt for contacts and to delay updating the tally sheet until there's a lull in the action. And, regrettably, memory sometimes falters. The simplest, and therefore most accurate, on-screener tallying systems provide numbers at each term point:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This allows the interviewer to circle the next available number quickly and get on with the chase. It's simple, fast, and as foolproof as it gets.

Pain-free intercepts

Mall intercept interviewers are a hardworking bunch who spend their shifts being rejected, dealing competently with the intricacies of several surveys simultaneously and keeping track of constantly changing quotas - while managing to be relaxed, friendly and interested. They can handle any questionnaire thrown at them, no matter how cumbersome. But there's no need for any questionnaire to be cumbersome. A lot of thought and energy goes into getting your study design absolutely correct. Applying common sense and empathy can make your questionnaire an outstanding, user-friendly one for interviewers, and their appreciation will be from the heart.