Training Field Staff Posted on March 19, 2007 It's important to have well-trained interview staff, says Joel W. Grube (bio).

But the training is key in those issues. They're also required to go through human subjects training, and the purpose of that training, and you can train them to do the nuts and bolts of the data collection, but what the human subjects training does is teaches people, really, what their responsibilities are in terms of confidentiality, what the respondents’ rights are, the things that you can and cannot do with your respondents in terms of getting them to cooperate or encouraging or overly encouraging them to cooperate and so on. So that's a very key aspect of it. And NIH requires that now with any key staff on projects that are funded through the NIH.

As a part of the training, generally speaking, particularly with a field staff, you're dealing a lot with issues of how to ask questions and how to get answers. And that's in terms of making the respondents feel comfortable and at ease with you but also it has to do with how not to lead respondents or put subtle biases into the data collection you may not even be aware of. That's a huge area, a huge problem.

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