The aim of this paper is to outline the results of the study that was carried out among CATI interviewers from October 2009 to August 2010. 12 major Polish research organizations as well as two companies in Norway and Iceland participated in the research (Norwegian and Icelandic modules of the project were co-financed by technical assistance funds of the EEA Financial Mechanism and the Norwegian Financial Mechanism within the framework of the Scholarship and Training Fund). The research was based on a standardized self-completion questionnaire (in total 942 interviewers were surveyed) and in-depth interviews (which were conducted with 49 experienced CATI interviewers).
This paper focuses on select results of the qualitative part of the project; it investigates difficult situations encountered by the interviewers while conducting telephone surveys. During IDIs the interviewers were encouraged to describe the differences between “mobile” and “landline” respondents, especially in terms of the persuasiveness of the introductory speech and communication interferences during question-asking and answer-recording stage. The interviewers were also asked to elaborate on the relationship between the probability of encountering difficulties while talking to the respondents on the mobile / landline phone and different features, such as b2b/b2c character of the project, socio-demographic characteristics of the respondent, sampling procedures (RDD versus list-assisted samples), etc.