I’ve discussed the role of framing before: the way in which you ask questions in surveys influences the answers you get and therefore modifies the survey results. (See here and here for instance). It happens quite often that polling organizations or media inadvertently or even deliberately frame questions in a way that will seduce people to answer the question in a particular fashion. In fact you can almost frame questions in such a way that you get any answer you want.
However, the questioner may matter just as much as the question.
Consider this fascinating new study, based on surveys in Morocco, which found that the gender of the interviewer and how that interviewer was dressed had a big impact on how respondents answered questions about their views on social policy. …
[T]his paper asks whether and how two observable interviewer characteristics, gender and gendered religious dress (hijab), affect survey responses to gender and non-gender-related questions. [T]he study finds strong evidence of interviewer response effects for both gender-related items, as well as those related to support for democracy and personal religiosity … Interviewer gender and dress affected responses to survey questions pertaining to gender, including support for women in politics and the role of Shari’a in family law, and the effects sometimes depended on the gender of the respondent. For support for gender equality in the public sphere, both male and female respondents reported less progressive attitudes to female interviewers wearing hijab than to other interviewer groups. For support for international standards of gender equality in family law, male respondents reported more liberal views to female interviewers who do not wear hijab, while female respondents reported more liberal views to female respondents, irrespective of dress. (source, source)
Other data indicate that the effect occurs in the U.S. as well. This is potentially a bigger problem than the framing effect since questions are usually public and can be verified by users of the survey results, whereas the nature of the questioner is not known to the users.
There’s an overview of some other effects here. More on the headscarf is here. More posts in this series are here.
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