Sylff Research Grant

2024-2025

Project leader: Blanka Szeitl

Project Participants: Gergely Horzsa

Research assistant: Anna Krisztina Kovács (external staff)

 

The objective of the research is to describe the Hungarian interviewer network regarding its impact on sample composition and data quality. Studying a country's survey interviewer network is crucial for enhancing data quality, reducing biases, and ensuring the reliability and validity of survey results. It aids in improving operational efficiency, tailoring survey methods to cultural contexts, and developing innovative survey techniques. 

 

The five specific research questions are: 

• How to describe the network of interviewers conducting survey data collections in Hungary? 

• How has it changed due to the COVID virus? 

• What are its local characteristics and what are the features that could be valid for other European countries? 

• What are its current major problems, with a particular focus on those that may have an impact on the willingness to respond and on data quality? 

• What are the benefits that could be worth implementing in new methods that have emerged because of technological progress?

 

The data collection involves conducting semi-structured qualitative interviews with fieldwork professionals. The objective is to identify biases in estimates from survey research that may be due to human factors from the field, and to find the optimum trade-off between the introduction of new techniques and the improvement of the current state of survey interviewers’ network for empirical social sciences.