Surveying Illiterate Individuals: Are Audio Files in Computer-Assisted Self-Interviews a Useful Supportive Tool?

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter focuses on specific challenges to surveying newly arrived immigrants with a focus on refugees. In addition to the need to provide interviews for immigrants in their native language, it must be taken into account that a considerable proportion of this group has poor or no reading skills in their native language. Two strategies can be used to avoid systematically excluding this population: offering interviews with native-speaking interviewers or using computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI) with additional audio files that enable respondents to listen to a questionnaire. We discuss the pros and cons of both strategies. Subsequently, using the data from the first wave of the German refugee study ReGES, in which both strategies were offered as a combined approach, we consider their effectiveness and practicability in more detail. Although native-speaking interviewers can increase cooperation and help to not exclude illiterate individuals, they also can encourage a higher social desirability bias. However, illiterate interviewees are more likely to take advantage of the interviewer’s support to read the questions aloud than to use the audio files. Nevertheless, we also found that a small but substantial subgroup of interviewees with little or no reading skills used the audio files often.