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Context Effects in Social and Psychological Research
Norbert Schwarz Seymour Sudman Editors
Context Effects in Social and Psychological Research
With 10 Illustrations
Springer-Verlag New York Berlin Heidelberg London Paris Tokyo Hong Kong Barcelona Budapest
Norbert Schwarz Program Director ZUMA 6800 Mannheim Gennany
Seymour Sudman Survey Research Laboratory University ofillinois Urbana, IL61801 USA
Libm!'Y of COIIirtSs Cataloging-in-Publication Data Con~t effeclS in social and psychological ~b I Norben
Schwan:, SeylIlOllr Sudman, editorll. p. em.
PapcI1l from a conference on Cognition and survey ~h, held September 28--0ct0ber I , 1989 in Kill Devil Hills, N.C. , sponsored by the Zentrum fUr Umfmgen, Methoden und Analysen, and by the Survey Research Laboratory and the Dept. of Business Administration, Universily of D1inois at Urbana-Champaign.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN· n , 978·1·4612·7695 ·1 ~ISBN ·13: 978·1·4612 ·2848·6 IJOE: 10.10071978·1·4612· 28018·6 I. Social surveys-Psychological aspccts~Congresses. 2. Context
effects (Ps)icoology)-congresses. 1. Schwan:, Norben, Dr. phil . n. Sudman, Seymour. m . Zentrum fUr Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen (Germany) IV. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Survey Research Laboratory. V. Unive rsily of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign. Dept. of Business Administration. HN29.C64 1991
JOO '.72-<k20 91-31820
Printed on acid-f~ paper.
© 1992 Springer-Verlag New York,lnc. Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 151 edilion 1992 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in pan without the wrilten permission of the publisher (Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 17S Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafleT developed is forbidden . The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, eIC., in Ihis publication, even if the former are not especially idenlified, is not to be taken as a sign that such names, as understood by the Trade Marks and Merchandise Marks Act. may accordingly be used freely by anyone.
Camera-ready copy supplied by the authors.
9876H321
Acknowledgments
The conference on which the present volume is based was supported by the Survey Research Laboratory and the Walter Stellner Memorial Fund of the Department of Business Administration, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, by the Zentrum fUr Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen, Mannheim, Germany, and by grant SWF 0044-6 from the Bundesminister fUr Forschung und Technologie of the Federal Republic of Germany to Norbert Schwarz.
Bibb Latane and Deborah Richardson hosted the conference at the Nags Head Conference Center in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Their hospitality, the joys of southern cooking, and the outer banks of North Carolina greatly contributed to an enjoyable and productive meeting. Special thanks are due to Mary A. Spaeth, who edited all contributions to this volume and turned a pile of manuscripts into a readable book. Finally, we thank all conference participants for lively and controversial discussions from breakfast to midnight and for the fine chapters that they contributed.
Mannheim, Germany Urbana, Illinois April 1991
Norbert Schwarz Seymour Sudman
Contents
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Contributors ......................... .
PART I. INTRODUCTION AND HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
Chapter 1 Introduction Norbert Schwarz and Seymour Sudman .
Chapter 2 Context Effects: State of the Past/State of the Art Howard Schuman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
PART II. QUESTION-ORDER EFFECTS IN SURVEYS
Chapter 3 "Order Effects" in Survey Research: Activation and Information Functions of Preceding Questions Fritz Strack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 4 Context Effects on Responses to Attitude Questions: Attitudes as Memory Structures
xi
3
5
23
Roger Tourangeau. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Chapter 5 Constructive Processes as a Source of Context Effects in Survey Research: Explorations in Self-Generated Validity lackM.Feldman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
viii Contents
Chapter 6 Question-Order Effects and Brand Evaluations: The Moderating Role of Consumer Knowledge Barbara A. Bickart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Chapter 7 Basking and Brooding: The Motivating Effects of Filter Questions in Surveys Leonard L. Martin and Thomas F. Harlow . . . . . . .
Chapter 8 Serial Context Effects in Survey Interviews Dancker D. L. Doomen and Steven E. de Bie
Chapter 9 Questionnaire Context as a Source of Response Differences in Mail and Telephone Surveys John Tarnai and Don A. Dillman ............. .
Chapter 10 Context Effects as Substantive Data in Social Surveys Jook B. Billiet. Lina Waterplas. and Geert Loosveldt
Chapter 11 Qualitative Analysis of Question-Order and Context Effects: The Use of Think-Aloud Responses George F. Bishop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 12 Thoughts on the Nature of Context Effects Tom W. Smith .............. .
PART III. RESPONSE-ORDER EFFECTS IN SURVEYS
Chapter 13 A Cognitive Model of Response-Order Effects in Survey Measurement
81
97
115
131
149
163
Norbert Schwarz. Hans-J. Hippler. and Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. 187
Chapter 14 The Impact of Cognitive Sophistication and Attitude Importance on Response-Order and Question-Order Effects Jon A. Krosnick. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Contents ix
PART IV. ORDER EFFECTS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING
Chapter 15 Order Effects within Personality Measures Eric S. Knowles, Michelle C. Coker, Deborah A. Cook, Steven R. Diercks, Mary E. Irwin, Edward J. Lundeen, John W. Neville, and Mark E. Sibicky. . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 16 Context Influences on the Meaning of Work Gerald R. Salancik and Julianne F. Brand.
Chapter 17 The Psychometrics of Order Effects Abigail T. Panter. Jeffrey S. Tanaka. and Tracy R. Wellens
PART V. SOCIAL JUDGMENT
Chapter 18 Information-Processing Functions of Generic Knowledge Structures and Their Role in Context Effects in Social Judgment
221
237
249
Galen V. Bodenhausen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Chapter 19 Context Effects and the Communicative Functions of Quantifiers: Implications for Their Use in Attitude Research Linda M. Moxey and Anthony J. Sanford . ........ .
Chapter 20 Cognitive Representation of Bipolar Survey Items
279
Thomas M. Ostrom. Andrew L. Betz. and John J. Skowronski. 297
PART VI. SUMMARY
Chapter 21 What Have We Learned? Norman M. Bradburn
References. . . . . . .
315
325
Contributors
Chapter 1 Norbert Schwarz is Program Director at ZUMA, a social science methodology
center in Mannheim, Germany, and "Privatdozent" of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg. He received degrees in Sociology (Dipl.-Soz., Dr. phil.) from the University of Mannheim and in Psychology (Dr. phil. habil.) from the University of Heidelberg. His research interests focus on human judgmental processes, in particular the interplay of affect and cognition, and the application of social cognition research to survey methodology. He serves on the editorial boards of several social science journals, including Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Public Opinion Quarterly.
Seymour Sudman is Walter H. Stellner Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Professor of Business Administration and of Sociology, and Deputy Director and Research Professor at the Survey Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Business from the University of Chicago. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 14 books and over 100 articles dealing primarily with survey methodology and response effects in surveys. His current research interests are related to cognitive aspects of proxy reporting in surveys.
Chapter 2 Howard Schuman is Program Director in the Institute for Social Research and
Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan. He is also the current editor of Public Opinion Quarterly. His publications (with co-authors) include Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form. Wording. and Context (1981), Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations (1985), and "Generations and Collective Memories," American Sociological Review (1989).
xii Contributors
Chapter 3 Fritz Strack is Senior Researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholo
gical Research, Munich, Germany. His research is primarily in the area of social cognition and social judgment Specifically, he is interested in the psychological processes underlying standardized situations.
Chapter 4 Roger Tourangeau is Senior Scientist in the Washington, DC, office of
NORC. He has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University and previously worked for 10 years in the Chicago office of NORC, where he served as a sampling statistician and conducted research on survey methods. He was one of the editors of the National Academy Press volume, Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology: Building a Bridge between Disciplines (1984). With Kenneth Rasinski, he co-authored a review of the literature on question-order effects that appeared in Psychological Bulletin (1988). Aside from his work on survey methodology, he has published a number of papers on issues in cognitive psychology, particularly the comprehension of figurative language.
Chapter 5 Jack M. Feldman is Professor of Psychology and Adjunct Professor of Man
agement at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, specializing in social and industriaVorganizational psychology. His professional interests are in the application of theory in social cognition to problems of human judgment and behavior, especially in organizational contexts. Recent research concerns the role of constructive processes in judgment and behavior in many domains, including organizational and consumer decision making.
Chapter 6 Barbara A. Bickart is Assistant Professor of Marketing and Director of the
Bureau of Economic and Business Research Survey Program, University of Florida in Gainesville. She received her Ph.D. in Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines the effects of knowledge structure, memory, and contextual factors on the survey response process.
Chapter 7 Leonard L. Martin is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology and
Institute for Behavior Research, University of Georgia. He is currently finishing editing Construction of Social Judgment with Abraham Tesser.
Thomas F. Harlow is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology, University of Georgia.
Contributors xiii
ChapterS Dancker D. L. Daamen is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at Leiden
University, from which he received his degree (Drs.). His research interests and publications are in the areas of attitude formation, risk perception, and context effects in surveys.
Steven E. de Bie is Deputy Research Director of the Netherlands Court of Audit. He received is degree (Drs.) in Economics from the University of Amsterdam. He has worked as a researcher at the Department of Data Theory, as head of the data collection department at the Social Research Center (Leiden University), and as coordinator of data collection at the Association of Social Research Institutes (Amsterdam). He is the author of books and articles on survey research methodology.
Chapter 9 John Tarnai is Assistant Director of the Social and Economic Sciences Re
search Center, Washington State University, from which he received a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology. His primary research interests are in computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), survey measurement, and experimental designs.
Don A. Dillman is Director of the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center and Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Rural Sociology, Washington State University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Iowa State University. He is the author of Mail and Telephone Surveys: The Total Design Method (1978) and approximately 100 other publications on telecommunications, rural society, and survey research methods.
Chapter 10 Jaak B. Billiet is Professor in Sociological Methodology and in Data Proc
essing, Department of Sociology, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology. His current research deals with response effects in social surveys and with national surveys about xenophobia and political attitudes in Belgium.
Lina Waterplas was a former research assistant in the Department of Sociology, Catholic University of Leuven, and is currently employed in a division of the European Parliament, Luxembourg.
Geert Loosveldt is Assistant Professor in Social Statistics and Senior Research in the Department of Sociology, Catholic University of Leuven. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology. His current research deals with the analysis of interviewer-respondent interactions in social surveys.
xiv Contributors
Chapter 11 George F. Bishop is Professor of Political Science and Senior Research As
sociate in the Behavioral Sciences Laboratory, University of Cincinnati, where he directs The Greater Cincinnati Survey. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Michigan State University. He is an active participant in the American Association for Public Opinion Research, past president of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, and has published a number of articles on question form and context effects in surveys in Public Opinion Quarterly, for which he presently serves as a member of the editorial board.
Chapter 12 Tom W. Smith is Director of the General Social Survey at NORC, Univer
sity of Chicago. His chief research interests are social change and survey methodology. He is author of Trends in Public Opinion and editor of the Poll Report section of the Public Opinion Quarterly.
Chapter 13 Norbert Schwarz-see Chapter 1.
Hans-J. Hippler is Project Director at ZUMA, Mannheim, Germany. He received degrees in Sociology (Dipl.-Soz., Dr. phil.) from the University of Mannheim. His current research interests focus on cognitive aspects of survey methodology, the impact of mode of data collection on data quality, and communication and value research.
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann is Director of the Institut fUr Demoskopie, Allensbach, Germany, which she founded in 1947. Since 1964 she has been Professor of Mass Communication Research at the University of Mainz. She has been a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, since 1978 and Georges Lurcy Visiting Professor since 1985. Having served as past president of World Association for Public Opinion Research, her numerous publications focus on survey research methodology, international comparisons of value systems, public opinion theory, and the effects of mass media. Since 1978 she has served as public opinion analyst of the German newspaper Franlifurter Allgemeine Zeitung and is currently co-editor of International Journal of Public Opinion Research.
Chapter 14 Jon A. Krosnick is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Political Science
at The Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. is Social Psychology from the University of Michigan. He is the author of two books and many journal articles and book chapters in psychology, sociology, and political science. He is a member of the editorial boards of Public Opinion Quarter-
Contributors xv
Iy, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and recently served as invited guest editor for a special issue of Social Cognition that focused on political psychology. The primary foci of his research have been political cognition in the American public and cognitive aspects of survey questionnaire design for public opinion measurement.
Chapter 15 Eric S. Knowles is Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology,
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas. He received his Ph.D. from Boston University and has taught and chaired the psychology departments at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay and University of Arkansas. He has contributed research to social, environmental, and personality psychology, including a previous Springer-Verlag book by Ickes and Knowles, Personality, Roles and Social Behavil>r (1982). His current research includes programs in measurement reactivity, group identity, and forms of social awareness.
Michelle C. Coker is a Ph.D. graduate of the Clinical Psychology Program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She is currently working as a mental health practitioner in Kansas.
Deborah A. Cook is a graduate student in Social Psychology at the University of Arkansas. Her current research is in social cognition.
Steven R. Diercks is a former student in the Department of Psychology, University of Arkansas, who is currently working in the drug prevention fteld.
Mary E. Irwin and John W. Neville are graduate students in Clinical Psychology at the University of Arkansas.
Edward J. Lundeen is a Ph.D. graduate of the Clinical Psychology Program at the University of Arkansas. He is currently working as a mental health practitioner in Massachusetts.
Mark E. Sibicky is Assistant Professor of Psychology, Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio. He is a Ph.D. graduate of the Clinical Psychology Program at the University of Arkansas. His current research concerns social identity, empathy, and altruism.
Chapter 16 Gerald R. Salancik is David and Barbara Kirr Professor of Organization, Car
negie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Yale University, taught at the University of
xvi Contributors
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and studies information influences in al
titude responses and organizational power and adaption.
Julianne F. Brand is Assistant Professor, DePaul University, Chicago. She is completing her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior at the Department of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and studies cognitive biases in attitude judgments and organizing practices of entrepreneurs.
Chapter 17 Abigail T. Panter is Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology and the
L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her current research interests include psychometric models that identify person consistencies in the item response process and personality assessment.
Jeffrey S. Tanaka is Associate Professor, Departments of Educational Psychology and Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among topics of current research interest are multivariate statistics with latent variables and the interface of personality and cognition.
Tracy R. Wellens received a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from New York University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at ZUMA in Mannheim, Germany. Her research looks to socio-cognitive and linguistic factors applied to the item comprehension and interpretation process.
Chapter 18 Galen v. Bodenhausen is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Michigan
State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests focus on social judgment processes, with particular emphasis on the role of stereotypes and prejudice on decision making and the interface of affective and cognitive systems in social perception and judgment
Chapter 19 Linda M. Moxey is Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of
Glasgow, Scotland, from which she received her Ph.D. in Psychology. She has been interested in the semantics of natural language quantifiers such asfew and a lot and has also developed an interest in connectionism.
Anthony J. Sanford is Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Cantab. He has had a long-standing interest in cognitive science approaches to human understanding and in how knowledge is stored and accessed. His books include Cognition and Cognitive Psychology (1985), The Mind of Man
Contributors xvii
(1987), and, co-authored with S. G. Garrod, Understanding Written Language (1981).
Chapter 20 Thomas M. Ostrom is Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology,
The Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published three books and served for seven years as the editor of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research is in the area of social cognition, person perception, and attitudes.
Andrew L. Betz is graduate student in social psychology at The Ohio State University, from which he received his M.A. His research interests include the subliminal conditioning of attitudes and the effects of mental representation on social interference.
John J. Skowronski is Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, teaching at the Newark Campus. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Iowa. His primary research is on mental representations and use of social information; he has also published on the topics of autobiographical memory and the decision to become an organ donor.
Chapter 21 Norman M. Bradburn is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service
Professor at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the faculties of the Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Business, Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, and the College. Provost of the Unive~ sity of Chicago from 1984 to 1989, he has assumed the directorship of NORC, a social science research center affiliated with the University, a position that he has held twice before. At NORC he has been a Senior Study Director and Research Associate since 1961. As a social psychologist, he has been in the vanguard of the developing theory and practice in the field of sample survey research. His work has focused on the study of psychological well-being and assessments of the quality of life, nonsampling errors in sample surveys, and, recently, research on cognitive processes in responses to sample surveys. He has co-authored (with Seymour Sudman) two books on the methodology of questionnaire design and construction, and Polls and Surveys: Understanding What They Tell Us (1988).