Introduction

When an interviewer and a respondent are engaged in a survey interview, they are performing communicative actions. The interviewer asks a question, and sometimes presents the answering categories, by reading the questionnaire. The question is answered by the respondent, and the interviewer acknowledges that the answer has been received. This results in the following action sequence:

In survey methodology the question-answer-acceptance sequence is considered the “prototype sequence” (Schaeffer and Maynard 1996) or “norm sequence” (Van der Zouwen and Dijkstra 1995) in standardized survey interviews. Interviewer and respondent are considered as behaving “adequately” if they act according to the script; that is, if the interviewer reads the question (and response options) exactly as written, and the respondent provides an answer that matches the question or selects one of the presented answer categories.

Behavior coding studies of recorded survey interviews show that all participants often behave “inadequately.” Interviewers rephrase questions, change the order of the questions, probe in a leading manner, fail to read the answer options, or read only parts of the questions (Smit 1995). Respondents, for their part, provide answers that do not match the options, say more than just “yes” or “no” in response to a yes–no question (Molenaar and Smit 1996), and behave in other “inadequate” ways.

When both interviewers and respondents behave inadequately from a stimulus-response perspective, they do not act in the way that the questionnaire designer expects.