Religiosity-of-Interviewer Effects: Assessing the Impact of Veiled Enumerators on Survey Response in Egypt

Abstract

While public opinion research has expanded rapidly in the Islamic world since 2001, little scholarly work has examined interviewer effects related to an enumerator's religious adherence. We find that the perceived religiosity of an interviewer impacts respondents' expressions of personal piety and adherence to Islamic cultural norms in a sample of approximately 1,200 women in Greater Cairo. Muslim women indicate that they are more religious and adherent to Islamic cultural norms when interviewed by an enumerator donning the Islamic headscarf. Conversely, members of Egypt's minority Coptic Christian community report that they are less adherent to Christianity when interviewed by a veiled enumerator. Through psychological processes of strategic self-presentation of identity and impression management, the veil may trigger Muslim respondents to express what they perceive to be socially desirable (i.e., more devout) responses; in contemporary Egypt, being perceived as pious may elicit social and economic benefits. Christians appear to deemphasize their religious identity to avoid appearing at odds with the dominant, Muslim majority to which the enumerator appears to belong. Younger, poorer and less educated womenwho may be most susceptible to concerns about social desirabilityshow the largest effects.

Does Interviewer Religious Dress Affect Survey Responses? Evidence from Morocco

“…Moroccan Nadia Fadir (2009, 84) wrote about the job market: "Most of the time, the job announcement states that women should be 'good looking and present herself well' which automatically makes the hijab unacceptable. Hijab projects modesty and chastitysocially important traitsby protecting against perceptions of availability or immorality (Blaydes and Gillum 2013;Blaydes and Linzer 2008;Heyat 2008). Despite its many social and political meanings, hijab is best understood as a symbol of religiosity and adherence to fundamentalist Islam (Essers and Benschop 2007).…”

The white-man effect: How foreigner presence affects behavior in experiments

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The politics of local research production: surveying in a context of ethnic competition

“…In developing country contexts, the literature on interviewer effects has primarily focused on and found significant effects of interviewer gender on survey questions about sexual behavior (Becker, Feyisetan, and Makinwa-Adebusoye 1995;McCombie and Anarfi 2002) and "gender-sensitive" questions (Flores-Macias and Lawson 2008; Benstead forthcoming). In North Africa, recent survey experiments found perceived religiosity of an interviewer to influence respondents' reported piety (Blaydes and Gillum 2013), attitudes toward religion more generally (Benstead 2012), and attitudes on women's role in the public sphere (Benstead forthcoming). If respondents give different survey responses conditional on ethnic or gender match with their interviewers, survey data and any analysis thereof would be biased based on the survey interviewer team's ethnic or gender makeup, and potentially the intersection of these identities (Benstead 2012).…”

“…A recent interview experiment in Egypt shows both sides of the conditional social attribution model (Blaydes and Gillum 2013). Christian women were more likely to present themselves as less religious and more adherent to Islamic cultural norms when interviewed by a veiled woman.…”