The major differences between face‐to‐face and telephone interviews as well as self‐administered questionnaires are reviewed and are related to the cognitive and communicative processes assumed to underlie the process of question answering. Based on these considerations the impact of administration mode on the emergence of well‐known response effects in survey measurement is discussed, and relevant experimental evidence is reported. It is concluded that administration mode affects the emergence of question order and context effects; the emergence of response order effects; the validity of retrospective reports; and the degree of socially desirable responding. The emergence of question wording and question form effects, on the other hand, appears to be relatively independent of administration mode.
This research tests the widespread assumption that response effects due to variations in question form, wording, or context will be greatest among respondents who are least involved with an issue. A meta-analysis of results from 15 splitballot experiments conducted over a five-year period indicates that the response effects of using counterarguments or middle alternatives in survey questions are significantly larger, as would be expected, among respondents who are less involved with a given issue than among those who are highly involved with it. But the effects of question order and response order appear to be largely unrelated to how involved a respondent is with a particular issue. Issue involvement, then, appears to specify some response effects, but not others.Public opinion researchers have long assumed that the respondents who are most susceptible to being influenced by the way in which a question is worded, the form in which it is presented, or the order or context in which it is asked are those who are least involved with an issue and whose views on the subject are therefore not well crystallized or held with much conviction (see, e.g., Cantril, 1944; Converse, 1974;Payne, 1951). But a recent investigation by Krosnick and Schuman (1988), based on nearly thirty experiments conducted over a ten-year period in various national surveys, indicates that this widespread assumption about who it is that is most susceptible to response effects may very well be wrong (cf. Stember and Hyman, 1949-50;Sudman and Bradburn, 1974;Sudman and Swensen, 1985, cited in Krosnick and Schuman, for previous evidence on the hypothesis). With the notable exception of the effects of offering or omitting a middle response GEORGE F.
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