TL;DR: The number of people exposed to environmental tobacco smoke in California seems to have decreased over the same time period, where exposure is determined by the reported time spent with a smoker.
Abstract: Because human activities impact the timing, location, and degree of pollutant exposure, they play a key role in explaining exposure variation. This fact has motivated the collection of activity pattern data for their specific use in exposure assessments. The largest of these recent efforts is the National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS), a 2-year probability-based telephone survey ( n=9386) of exposure-related human activities in the United States (U.S.) sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The primary purpose of NHAPS was to provide comprehensive and current exposure information over broad geographical and temporal scales, particularly for use in probabilistic population exposure models. NHAPS was conducted on a virtually daily basis from late September 1992 through September 1994 by the University of Maryland's Survey Research Center using a computer-assisted telephone interview instrument (CATI) to collect 24-h retrospective diaries and answers to a number of personal and exposure-related questions from each respondent. The resulting diary records contain beginning and ending times for each distinct combination of location and activity occurring on the diary day (i.e., each microenvironment). Between 340 and 1713 respondents of all ages were interviewed in each of the 10 EPA regions across the 48 contiguous states. Interviews were completed in 63% of the households contacted. NHAPS respondents reported spending an average of 87% of their time in enclosed buildings and about 6% of their time in enclosed vehicles. These proportions are fairly constant across the various regions of the U.S. and Canada and for the California population between the late 1980s, when the California Air Resources Board (CARB) sponsored a state-wide activity pattern study, and the mid-1990s, when NHAPS was conducted. However, the number of people exposed to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in California seems to have decreased over the same time period, where exposure is determined by the reported time spent with a smoker. In both California and the entire nation, the most time spent exposed to ETS was reported to take place in residential locations.
TL;DR: In this paper, the advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face, telephone, e-mail and MSN messenger interviews are compared in the domain of virtual teams, where the authors used various communication possibilities to interview informants.
Abstract: Face-to-face interviews have long been the dominant interview technique in the field of qualitative research. In the last two decades, telephone interviewing became more and more common. Due to the explosive growth of new communication forms, such as computer mediated communication (for example e-mail and chat boxes), other interview techniques can be introduced and used within the field of qualitative research. For a study in the domain of virtual teams, I used various communication possibilities to interview informants as well as face-to-face interviews. In this article a comparison will be made concerning the advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face, telephone, e-mail and MSN messenger interviews. By including telephone and MSN messenger interviews in the comparison, the scope of this article is broader than the article of BAMPTON and COWTON (2002).
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed two ways in which shifting such surveys to random digit dialing (RDD) telephone interviewing might affect the quality of data acquired, and test these hypotheses using data from three different mode experiments.
Abstract: The last 50 years have seen a gradual replacement of face-to-face interviewing with telephone interviewing as the dominant mode of survey data collection in the United States. But some of the most expensive and large-scale nationally funded, long-term survey re- search projects involving national area-probability samples and long questionnaires retain face-to-face interviewing as their mode. In this article, we propose two ways in which shifting such surveys to random digit dialing (RDD) telephone interviewing might affect the quality of data acquired, and we test these hypotheses using data from three na- tional mode experiments. Random digit dialing telephone respondents were more likely to satisfice (as evidenced by no-opinion responding, nondifferentiation, and acquiescence), to be less cooperative and en- gaged in the interview, and were more likely to express dissatisfaction with the length of the interview than were face-to-face respondents, despite the fact that the telephone interviews were completed more quickly than the face-to-face interviews. Telephone respondents were also more suspicious about the interview process and more likely to present themselves in socially desirable ways than were face-to-face respondents. These findings shed light on the nature of the survey re- sponse process, on the costs and benefits associated with particular survey modes, and on the nature of social interaction generally.
TL;DR: Responses to the aural modes (telephone and IVR) are significantly more likely than are respondents to the visual modes (mail and web) to give extreme positive responses, a difference that cannot be accounted for by a tendency towards recency effects with telephone.