Editor's note: Terence Haller is chairman of the Older Americans Research Institute, Wilmette, Ill.

My firm specializes in research with senior citizens. Since this is how I now make a nice living, I'm willing to admit that I am a senior. I suppose it takes one to know one, at least that's the adage that comes to mind when I remember the frustration of confronting the elderly respondent in my salad days as a novice researcher.

I particularly recall the sheer terror, when, as a trainee with Procter & Gamble doing door-to-door interviews (wisely compulsory in those days), the door opened and I confronted an aged, gray-haired woman. The engagement that followed was seldom comfortable and the interviewing process was labored and awkward, frequently culminating in an "interviewer term."

These days you can't afford to alienate senior citizens so easily because they represent such a huge and growing market segment and many have wads of money to spend. Nor do you need to agonize through your interviews with them. With experience we have cultivated a better grasp of the senior situation. Here are some of our observations:

  • Skeptical and disputatious. Many seniors are archly skeptical of anyone claiming to be conducting a marketing research study. So are lots of younger people, but the senior has been stung more by phony telephone sales pitches purporting to be surveys. Having, sometimes with physical strain, managed to reach the phone to answer your call, they aren't exactly tickled pink to encounter (what they suspect to be) another bothersome telemarketer. We try to overcome this by using interviewers with older-sounding voices and by eliminating much of the traditional baggage that opens most interviews. If you jump right into the guts of the interview you can usually mollify the senior respondent's suspicions.
  • Age does not make people stupid. Actually we have, time and time again, observed that in the true Biblical sense people do advance in wisdom with age. But you have to give them a chance. When they seem to take too long to fathom your questions it is usually because they are struggling to put it in a context that they understand. Clearly, there have been generational shifts in vocabulary. Seniors convert what you've just asked into the language of their day, much the same way that your word processing program converts files imported from different word processing programs.

    In fact, the computer analogy is not inappropriate. What we dismiss as the senior respondents' slow comprehension emanates from their need to comb through a broader storehouse of knowledge. The brain is the hard drive. It saves almost everything whether you ask it to or not. Like a hard drive, the more you store in the brain, the longer it takes to retrieve it. Furthermore, with age, the once simple process of answering a question is now complicated by the need to weigh and evaluate a greater array of options. This takes more time, but is not a sign of diminished intelligence. In healthy persons IQs do not decrease with age.
  • No longer shop until they drop. Most older consumers have a decreased interest in accumulating material goods. This is not because they see the Grim Reaper coming for them. It's largely because they have become jaded about the whole idea of acquisition and brand preference. This is noted in interviews where you will often hear them say, "I don't care about Brand X, just put down anything you want." They can quickly change their tune when the discussion rolls around to something specifically interesting to them. Study design must take pains to customize the questions to suit the elderly.
  • Political correctness. A big turn-off in any interview with seniors are questions that go into linguistic contortions to avoid that big sin of the '90s: political incorrectness. Most seniors are not sympathetic to this movement and resent having to share its sentiments with you. This doesn't mean you can call all 90-year-old women "girls" but the best approach is to keep your interview free of anything smacking of "newfangled" notions on society. Make sure your investigators understand that the interview is not a platform for any kind of proselytizing - no matter how worthy the cause.
  • They aren't cute. For some reason younger people have a habit of talking down to older people, much like a nurse asking you if you've taken your "little pillies today." No older person we have ever interviewed felt cute or in need of coddling. They hate being patronized. It makes them feel you think they just beamed down from another planet. They have a whole life behind them and know a lot more about this world than you do. Many of them think younger people are the ones with the empty and demeaning lives. They don't want cheap praise from you for being able to answer a few questions and they don't want a badge for still being alive. Your interviews should always regard them as normal, sentient beings. Prevail upon your interviewers to withhold any semblance of condescension.
  • Don't get chummy. Older people don't really believe you want to be their friend. Remember, they grew up here. They know how this country worships youth and fully realize that anyone who makes a living asking people questions isn't hankering to cozy up to them. This doesn't mean that overt hostility will work, but it does mean that a faked familiarity will backfire.
  • Spatial problems. The ability to cope with spatial relationships starts to decline in your 40s. By the time you get to be a senior it may present very obvious difficulties and certain kinds of questionnaires will be very challenging. For example, seniors have a lot of trouble with most kinds of rating scales. What you may see as a simple matrix in your mind, they see as a jumble of words and numbers. On the other hand, if you can stand the expense, seniors are much better at open-ends than younger people. As we mentioned, they possess a larger body of knowledge and most of them are very gracious in sharing it.
  • Avoid slickness. Don't try flattery and avoid facile promises in order to get through an interview. The elderly are often victims of various scams and are on the constant lookout for such things. They can smell a huckster a mile away, so purge your interview of verbiage even remotely suggesting a sales pitch.

The size of the senior market segment is slated to increase as Boomers become senior citizens. Sometime early in the next century there will be 60 million people in this market segment. More products and services will come along to cater to their needs. The marketing researchers who master the specialized methodologies of handling this segment will have their work cut out for them.