An ounce of prevention: using conversational interviewing and avoiding agreement response scales to prevent acquiescence

Acquiescent response style (ARS), the tendency for survey respondents to agree with survey items, is of particular concern for increasing measurement error in surveys with populations who are more likely to acquiesce, such as Latino respondents in the U.S. In order to develop methods for reducing ARS, this study addressed two questions: (1) Does administering a questionnaire using conversational interviewing (CI) yield less ARS than standardized interviewing (SI)? (2) Do bipolar disagree/agree (DA) response scales lead to higher ARS than unipolar response scales that do not assess agreement (non-AG)? A total of 891 Latino telephone survey respondents were screened for ARS and randomly assigned to four experimental groups determined by crossing interviewing technique (CI or SI) and response format (non-AG or DA): (1) SI/non-AG ( n = 301); (2) SI/DA ( n = 295); (3) CI/non-AG ( n = 149); and (4) CI/DA ( n = 146). CI yielded lower ARS than SI ( p < 0.001), but there was no difference in ARS between DA and non-AG response scales. A subset of coded interview recordings indicated that the CI interviewers reduced ARS by clarifying questions even in the absence of evidence of respondent confusion and helping with response mapping. These results suggest that difficulty answering questions associated with cognitive decline and cultural norms may have prompted higher use of ARS, but that conversational interviewers were able to mitigate these difficulties and cultural tendencies. Findings from this study suggest that using CI to administer survey questions may decrease ARS and improve data quality among survey respondents who are more likely to engage in ARS.