You Know What I Know: Interviewer Knowledge Effects in Subjective Expectation Elicitation

Abstract

Directly eliciting individuals' subjective beliefs via surveys is increasingly popular in social science research, but doing so via face-to-face surveys has an important downside: the interviewer's knowledge of the topic may spill over onto the respondent's recorded beliefs. Using a randomized experiment that used interviewers to implement an information treatment, we show that reported beliefs are significantly shifted by interviewer knowledge. Trained interviewers primed respondents to use the exact numbers used in the training, nudging them away from higher answers; recorded responses decreased by about 0.3 standard deviations of the initial belief distribution. Furthermore, respondents with stronger prior beliefs were less affected by interviewer knowledge. We suggest corrections for this issue from the perspectives of interviewer recruitment, survey design, and experiment setup.

Designing Information Provision Experiments

“…In the case of surveys administered by enumerators,Kerwin and Reynoso (2021) show that reported beliefs are significantly related to interviewer knowledge and suggest corrections from the perspectives of interviewer recruitment, survey design, and experiment setup.13 It is plausible that the willingness to please the experimenter could vary across different decision-making domains which might increase the relevance of demand effects.…”

Health knowledge and non-pharmaceutical interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa

“… 5 Since enumerator knowledege may affect recorded responses, we re-estimate our primary analyses with enumerator fixed effects in lieu of country fixed effects ( Kerwin and Reynoso (2020) ). Results are robust to this change (not shown).…”