George F. Bishop

Political Information Processing: Question Order and Context Effects

Data from two independent field experiments indicate that changes in question order and context may well account for an apparently precipitous decline of interest in politics at the time of the CPS 1978 American National Election Study. Evidence from a question order experiment with the SRC/CPS “feeling thermometers” also suggests that such contextual artifacts may not be atypical. Indeed, because of the many changes in the content and organization of the election studies over the years, context effects represent plausible rival hypotheses for a number of inexplicable shifts and trends in the time-series. In testing these hypotheses the authors derive and validate an information-processing model of how respondents infer their political “states of mind” from observations of their own question-answering behavior in the survey interview. In addition, the authors illustrate the wide applicability of the model tosubstantive problems in the discipline and its implications for the survey-based paradigm in political behavior research.

Response-Order Effects and the Early Gallup Split-Ballots

A meta-analysis of split-ballots conducted by the Gallup Organization in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s shows that response-order effects were generally small in magnitude when averaged across a great variety of topics and questions-typically less than 5 percent in effect size-and as compared with many of those reported in the response-effects literature today. When analyzed by various question characteristics, the results provided some support for predictions derived from current cognitive models of response-order effects, particularly those from satisficing theory. As predicted, questions asked orally were more likely to generate a statistically significant pattern of recency effects if the response alternatives or the questions as a whole were longer rather than shorter. Other predicted patterns of primacy and recency effects failed to materialize, however, perhaps largely because of the inherent design limitations and partial confounding of question attributes in any such secondary analysis of archival survey data, but perhaps, too, because of simple chance variations. The data from these early experiments nonetheless provide a partial, albeit limited, test of rival hypotheses and explanations of response-order effects in the literature

Experiments in filtering political opinions

Changes in the wording of “core” measures of political attitudes in the American National Election Studies have generated a good deal of controversy about artifactual sources of change in the U.S. electorate. This research, based on several field experiments and replications, investigates the effects of using or not using various types of opinion filter questions that have appeared in the SRC/CPS series over the years. The analysis shows that the use of a filter interacts significantly with a respondents level of education and interest in politics, particularly the latter, in determining whether a respondent will offer an opinion on a given public policy issue. But the study also demonstrates that such an interaction occurs primarily when the question about interest in politics is askedafter, rather thanbefore, a set of political issue items. In interpreting these order-and-context effects the authors develop a self-perception model of how respondents infer their interest in politics from information that isavailable in memory about their own behavior in the survey interview.

Context Effects on Self-Perceptions of Interest in Government and Public Affairs

Previous experiments have shown that when people are asked a question about how interested they are in politics, their answers can be significantly affected by the context in which the question is asked. When asked, for example, how much they “…follow what’s going on in government and public affairs…,” people are much less likely to say they follow such matters “most of the time” if they are asked about it immediately after being unable to answer some rather difficult questions about their United States Congressman’s record than if they are asked about it before such questions (see Bishop et al., 1982, 1984b). Similarly, when asked how interested they were “…in following the political campaigns…,” people were significantly more likely to say they were “very interested” when asked about it immediately after, rather than before, giving answers to several questions about the 1980 presidential election campaign, answers that implied that they were quite interested in following the political campaigns that year (see Bishop, Oldendick, & Tuchfarber, 1982, 1984a). Such is the influence of question order and context on people’s self-perceptions.

Interest in political campaigns: The influence of question order and electoral context

A split-ballot experiment shows that, when people are asked how interested they are in following political campaigns, their response depends not only on the order in which the question is asked, but also on the broader electoral context in which it is posed. When asked how interested they were in following the political campaigns immediatelyafter a question about whether or not they voted in the (1982) election, people were more likely to think they were interested in the campaign, especially if they claimed to have voted, than if they were asked about it immediatelybefore the question on whether or not they voted. This order effect, however, appears to depend onwhen the questions are asked. If asked within a few weeks after the election, there is little or no order effect. But later, as the memory of the campaign fades, the order of the questions makes a sizable difference in the results. This order effect also seems to be more pronounced among better-educated respondents, suggesting that they are more likely to feel pressured by a social norm to vote and to express an interest in political affairs, not only in “real life,” but in the survey interview as well. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications for the design of the interview schedule used in the American National Election Studies.

Education and mass belief systems: An extension and some new questions

Using the SRC/CPSs national election surveys from 1956 to 1976, this paper investigates the effect of education on consistency among the publics domestic policy opinions. Evidence from both gamma correlations and factor analysis indicates that education has neither a strong nor a linear effect on issue constraint over the 20 years covered by the data, for the lowest and the highest education strata consistently show the highest levels of constraint. We do not conclude, however, that education is unrelated to recognition of ideological concepts, for almost one-half of the lowest education stratum do not use “liberal” and “conservative” terms. We conclude that issue constraint does not directly translate into ideology and suggest some new directions that future research should take if we are to evaluate effectively the effect of education on opinion structuring.

Psychology of the Scientist: XXXV. Terminal and Instrumental Values of American Graduate Students in Psychology

The terminal and instrumental values of 954 graduate students from 98 psychology departments across the United States were compared with the values of a national subsample of Americans matched on age, race and educational background. Comparisons were also made between graduate students specializing in nine different fields of psychology. The results showed little agreement between the graduate students and the national comparison group on the importance of various values. Among those majoring in the different specialties, disparities were less marked, but clinical majors tended to emphasize interpersonal affective values such as true friendship, loving and helpful, while experimental majors placed relatively greater emphasis on cognitive competency values such as logical and intellectual.