The flexible use of verbal interaction coding

The verbal interaction coding is a quantitative technique used to encode the verbal interaction between interviewer and respondent. This technique is employed both to pretest survey questions, locating those which cause interviewer’s and respondent’s verbal deviations from the ideal sequence of standardization and, in data collection, to monitor and evaluate the interviewers’ behaviors according to the standard guidelines. Some scholars highlight that the main limit of this technique is to consider “as negative” all deviations. Actually two types of deviation exist: the deviation “harmful” to data quality (indicator of inaccurate question formulation or interviewer related error) and the “virtuous” ones, when interviewer and respondent vivaciously interact to understand each other. In this paper the authors present a study in which they tested a more qualitative verbal interaction coding, designed to overcome this limit. Thanks to this approach, during the questionnaire pretest, questions were reformulated only when many dangerous deviations gathered around, leaving out those which collected virtuous deviations. After the pretest, the researchers trained the interviewers and recommended them to adopt the virtuous behaviors, in order to have a flexible conduction and meet the respondents interpretative needs. During the fieldwork, the interviewers were monitored live, and who implemented a strict standardized conduction or “harmful deviant behaviors” was involved in a second training. In short, the authors of the study assert that a more qualitative verbal interaction coding, is useful to exceed its endemic limit because it allows to discern between bad and good deviant behaviors.