Your own carrier and the other driver's carrier both call in the first week, ask similar questions, and stand in entirely different relationships to you.
The call usually comes before the bruising has finished changing color. Somebody pleasant introduces themselves, confirms the date and time of the collision, expresses sympathy about the car, and then asks whether it is all right to record the conversation for the file. Two different companies place that call in the first week, often within a day of each other, and the questions they ask sound close enough to identical that most people answer both the same way. The relationships behind the two calls are not remotely the same, and the difference determines what a claimant is obliged to say.
The carrier you pay, and the carrier you are claiming against
Your own policy is a contract you signed, and buried in the conditions section is a cooperation clause: a promise to report the loss promptly, to submit to examination, to produce records the insurer reasonably requests, and to help it investigate and defend. That promise is enforceable. Refuse outright and the carrier can decline coverage, which matters enormously if you carry uninsured motorist coverage, medical payments coverage, or collision coverage you intend to use. The other driver's insurer has no contract with you at all. It has a duty to its own insured and an interest in your file, and nothing more.
That asymmetry is the whole story. One adjuster is administering benefits you bought. The other is estimating what it will cost to close a claim against a policyholder, and every answer you give becomes part of that estimate. Both are doing legitimate work. Neither is lying to you. But the second call is an interview conducted by the party that will eventually be writing, or resisting, the check, and treating it as a formality confuses a courtesy with an obligation.
Why the questions are shaped the way they are
Early questions cluster around three things: how the collision happened, what you felt in the first hours, and what you were doing in the months before. The liability questions look for an admission that can be characterized as comparative fault, a fraction shaved off the eventual number without anyone disputing that the collision happened. The injury questions look for a baseline. Say you felt shaken but basically fine on day two, which is true for a great many people with soft tissue injuries, and that sentence will be read back later against a course of treatment that started on day nine.
The prior history questions look for something to attribute the symptoms to: an old shoulder, a desk job, a gym membership, a previous claim. None of this is improper. Insurers price risk by finding alternative explanations, and adjusters are trained, evaluated, and supervised on how thoroughly they document them. Understanding the shape of the questions is far more useful than resenting them, because the shape tells you which answers need care and which are simply administrative.
What a careful reader checks before answering
Start with the declarations page and the conditions section of your own policy, which arrives every renewal and is almost never opened. Cooperation is usually owed to your carrier, not to a stranger's. The clause typically requires prompt notice, reasonable assistance, and an examination under oath if demanded, and an examination under oath is a formal proceeding with notice, not a phone call sprung on a Tuesday morning. Check whether your state's department of insurance publishes standards for claim handling conduct; the department that licenses the adjuster is also the body that oversees how claims are investigated and paid.
Then check the small things. Whether the recording has started. Whether the person on the line represents your carrier or the other one, by name, and which claim number they are working under. Whether the questions have moved from the collision to your medical past. Whether you actually know the answer, because an approximate date recited under mild pressure becomes an inconsistency six months later. Asking to call back after you have the police report number and your treatment dates in front of you is a perfectly ordinary request, and adjusters field it constantly.
The middle path most people end up taking
Cooperating fully with your own insurer while declining to give a recorded statement to the other side is not obstruction, and it does not stall the claim. The other carrier still gets the crash report, the estimates, the photographs, and eventually the medical records and bills, which is the documentary evidence that actually moves a valuation. What it does not get is an unrehearsed narrative recorded on day two, when the facts are least settled and you are least equipped to give them.
Say so plainly, in writing if possible, and keep the tone cordial. Adjusters remember who was straightforward with them.