How Does Video Interviewing Affect the Interviewers’ and Respondents’ Paralinguistic Behaviors? A First Exploration

Video interviews have been gradually adopted by survey organizations as an alternative to in-person interviews as a mode of data collection. Recent studies have shown that video and in-person interviews elicited similar levels of respondents’ rapport with interviewers and similar quality data. However, little is known about whether the presence and prevalence of interviewer and respondent paralinguistic behaviors, e.g., disfluencies such as “uh” and “um” or laughter, vary between the two modes, and when they do, how might this affect survey outcomes? To address these questions, we coded the presence of six paralinguistic behaviors in 710 question-answer (Q-A) sequences in 15 in-person interviews and 12 video interviews conducted by professional survey interviewers in a laboratory experiment. Most of the paralinguistic behaviors occurred equally often in the two interviewing modes except laughter which was significantly more prevalent in video than in-person interviews. We attributed the increased laughter in video interviews as a nervous response to greater communication difficulties in that mode. Nonetheless, this did not differentially impact the prevalence of respondents’ adequate responses, indicating (indirectly) that data quality was equivalent in the two modes. These findings bolster the emerging narrative that when interviewed via video, respondents’ experience and their answers are very similar to when they are interviewed in person.