Interviewing Older Adults: A Comparison of Telephone and Face-to-Face Modalities

This article examines telephone interviewing of older adults and compares it with face-to-face interviews. Specifically, the following issues are examined in several national surveys: (1) differences in age distributions between the samples of adults reached in both modes; (2) explanations for potential differences in age distributions; (3) differences between the two modes in demographic characteristics in the adults reached, in interview process and in response quality, and how these mode differences vary by age of the respondents. Telephone surveys tend to underrepresent older persons, and older persons who do participate in a telephone survey are disproportionately well educated. Implications of the lower response rate among older persons are softened by the fact that reponse distributions across a range of questions show little difference by interview mode between older persons and persons of other age groups