- I flunked the written test badly
- People were busy
- People forgot
- I was needed more urgently at my monitoring (and validating) duties
- People were not there
- People scheduled me for Tuesday but told me Monday
- There were Communications Breakdowns at any of several different critical points
- Something completely different
I had my first incident of a possible Bad Phone Goon Moment when validating today -- an angry respondent told me that he'd refused one of the demographics questions on a survey, and then the thing ended with not much grace. I reassured him that on this particular survey, that particular question is one of the last, if not the last question (which is true; I'm not horribly familiar with the survey anymore, so I couldn't say for certain) but in any case, it sounds like the phone goon did not handle the situation with much grace.
I've found that including the (usually invisible to the respondent) question about the gender of the respondent in the validation questions, merely for my convenience, is doing a lot to make my validation experience better. When I validate, I have the computer program display up to five questions from the survey to validate. Usually it's things like demographics or screening, like age/services used currently or in past X timeframe/do you or any member of your household work in $INDUSTRY. There are certain questions we're required to validate, but I like to include the gender so I can say, "Yes, it was a lady of your household, sir, on such-and-such a date." This has a much better success rate than "It was someone in your household on this date," because the first tends to get something more like, "I dunno, I'll hand you to the wife" (or "I dunno, the wife isn't here now,") whereas the second has about a 50% chance of getting a "Well, it wasn't me, and you're probably wasting your time," or something like that.
It was a decent day at work, and I'm up too late for my morning stuff tomorrow, but I'll go ahead and do it anyway, because it pleases me.
