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Although it has long been acknowledged that interviewers play a crucial role in the survey data collection process, there is little research concerning interviewer effects on how respondents perceive the interview. We investigate whether interviewer effects exist regarding how much respondents report having enjoyed the interview and whether these effects can be explained by interviewer characteristics. We use data from wave 9 of the German Family Panel pairfam, combined with data from an interviewer survey conducted prior to this wave. Applying multilevel models, we find large interviewer effects that can be explained only partly by interviewers' sociodemographic characteristics, attitudes, and behavior. Interviewers' gender, intrinsic work motivation, and their attitude toward respondents significantly affect how much respondents enjoy the interview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that third parties are present during a substantial amount of face-to-face interviews, bystander influence on respondents' response behavior is not yet fully understood. We use nine waves of the German Family Panel pairfam and apply fixed effects panel regression models to analyze effects of third-party presence on items regarding the sharing of household tasks between partners. We find that both male and female respondents report doing a smaller share of household tasks when their partner is present during the interview as compared to when their partner is not present. Similarly, if the respondent's partner is present, both partners' reports correspond more, so that they are less prone to resulting in unrealistically high sums. These results indicate that for items concerning household labor, partner presence does not compromise data quality but may in fact improve it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve high return among secondary respondents, primary respondents’ consent rates must be high. In the German Family Panel (pairfam), a large, randomly sampled panel study, primary respondents’ consent rates to surveying their parents were found to be low. Since we suspected that the underlying reason could be interviewer behavior, we tested in an experiment if placing the consent questions in the self-interview (CASI) part of the interview would increase consent rates. Results show that bypassing interviewers by asking respondents directly in the CASI section did not increase consent rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cluster policy is increasingly becoming part of many governments’ economic policy strategies. At the same time, evidence-based policy-making is gaining importance, bringing about a call for policy evaluation. Since the quality of the evaluation results depends highly on the method used, data, assumptions and techniques must be adequate for the specific evaluation question. This holds for cluster policy evaluation in particular, given the complexity and indirect nature of cluster policy interventions. This article provides an overview of evaluation methods suited to the ex-post analysis of cluster policy, covering both micro- and macroeconomic approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]