Comparison between Survey Modes in Egypt: Telephone and Face to Face Survey

The current study aims to investigate the differences between two methods of conducting surveys in Egypt, namely; Telephone surveys and Face to face surveys. The two surveys are compared according to Sample Representation, Survey mode, Survey Results and Data Quality. Two different weighting schemes are used for more investigation of differences to isolate the impact of survey mode on respondents' answers.
The study compares the results of two surveys about the same subject, at the same time period and the same implementing organization, one of them is via telephone while the other is via face-to-face interviewing. Methodologies used for comparing survey methods, includes: survey results, survey mode, non-response, and data quality, in addition to the Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Multiple Regression.
The results of the study showed that respondents’ characteristics were significantly different between the two surveys; and the characteristics of face to face sample are closer to population than telephone sample. Face to face respondents tended to be less educated and work in private sector, differences in gender-age distribution were not substantial. The results -about general perception towards corruption- showed that the two samples are significantly different. Using the new weighting scheme did not change the significance differences between telephone and face to face surveys. This confirms that the differences are attributed to the mode of interview, not only to variation in demographic characteristics.  Data quality was assessed using “no-opinion” responses, the telephone survey got less “no-opinion” responses; this was due to high percentage of educated respondents in telephone survey