Howard Schuman

Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs: Will the Trend toward Racially Separate Communities Continue?

Abstract Almost a decade ago, the Kerner Commission warned that this country was moving toward two societies—one white and one black. Data on residential segregation indicate clear-cut boundaries for these two societies—large cities are becoming black but most suburban areas remain white. Detroit is a case in point and this led the 1976 Detroit Area Study to investigate the sources of racial residential segregation. Our approach was guided by three hypothesized causes of this segregation: (i) the economic status of blacks, (ii) the preference of blacks to be with their own kind, and (iii) the resistance of whites to residential integration. We developed several new measurement techniques and found that most evidence supported the third hypothesis. Blacks in the Detroit area can afford suburban housing and both blacks and whites are quite knowledgable about the housing market. Most black respondents expressed a preference for mixed neighborhoods and are willing to enter such areas. Whites, on the other hand, are reluctant to remain in neighborhoods where blacks are moving in and will not buy homes in already integrated areas. This last result has been overlooked by traditional measures of white attitudes toward residential integration but emerges clearly with the new measure.

Attitude intensity, importance, and certainty and susceptibility to response effects.

Changes in attitude question form, wording, and context have repeatedly been shown to produce change in responses. It is often assumed that such response effects are less pronounced among individuals whose attitudes are intense, personally important, or held with great certainty. We report the results of 27 experiments conducted in national surveys designed to evaluate this hypothesis. Measures of attitude intensity, importance, and certainty were found not to differentiate individuals who show response effects from those who do not. We discuss possible explanations for these counterintuitive findings. It is now well documented that peoples reports of their own attitudes are influenced by a host of factors in addition to the attitudes themselves. Variations in the wording of an attitude question, the formal properties of its structure, or the context in which it is asked all alter responses in systematic ways (Schuman & Kalton, 1985). Such variations in attitude reports are referred to in the survey methodology literature as

RESPONSE RATES AND RESPONSE CONTENT IN MAIL VERSUS FACE-TO-FACE SURVEYS

Two surveys were administered based on the same area probability sampling frame and with some of the same questions: one sample was used for hour-long face-to-face interviewing in the 1992 Detroit Area Study; the other sample received a much shorter questionnaire in the mail for self-administration. The sample segments had previously been stratified in terms of the percentage that was black. For the predominantly white stratum, there was only a small difference in response rates due to mode of administration. For the predominantly black stratum, the mail survey obtained a considerably lower response rate then the face-to-face survey. Within the predominantly white stratum, there were no clear differences between results for the two modes of administration in demographic variables or in gross housing characteristics. However, the mail survey respondents expressed more negative attitudes toward racial integration and affirmative action than did the face-to-face respondents. Because the mail sample of the predominantly black stratum was small, it was not possible to carry out similar analyses of demographic or attitudinal differences, or to determine whether its lower response rate was due mainly to race, to correlates of race such as income MARIA KRYSAN is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Michigan. HOWARD SCHUMAN is a research scientist in the Institute for Social Research and professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. LESLI JO SCOTT iS manager of the telephone facility at the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research. PAUL BEATTY is a survey statistician at the Office of Research and Methodology at the National Center for Health Statistics. The authors wish to acknowledge advice and help from Charlotte Steeh (1992 Detroit Area Study director), Reynolds Farley (1992 Detroit Area Study faculty investigator), Michelle Mueller, and several other individuals connected with the 1992 Detroit Area Study. They received a number of useful comments on an earlier draft from Don Dillman. Willard Rodgers and James Lepkowski provided valuable assistance on calculating cluster effects. A grant to Howard Schuman from the National Science Foundation (SES-9212590) funded the mail survey component of this research. Funding for the 1992 Detroit Area Study came from the Ford Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the University of Michigan. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 58:381-399 ? 1994 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All rights reserved. 0033-362X/94/5803-0005

EFFECTS OF A PREPAID NONMONETARY INCENTIVE ON RESPONSE RATES AND RESPONSE QUALITY IN A FACE-TO-FACE SURVEY

02.50 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.25 on Mon, 12 Sep 2016 04:52:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 382 Krysan, Schuman, Scott, and Beatty or education, or even to problems with mail delivery in central cities.

Question Wording as an Independent Variable in Survey Analysis

We conducted a randomized experiment on a face-to- face interview survey in order to test the effects on response rates of a prepaid nonmonetary incentive. Results showed a sta- tistically significant increase in response rates, mostly through reduction in refusal rates, in the half sample that received the incentive (a gift-type ballpoint pen) as compared with a no incen- tive control group. The effect appears to be due to greater cooper- ation from incentive recipients at the initial visit by an inter- viewer. Unexpectedly, the incentive group also showed a significantly higher rate of sample ineligibility, possibly due to easier identification of vacant residences or nonexistent ad- dresses. In addition, evidence suggests greater response com- pleteness among responding incentive recipients early in the in- terview, with no evidence of increased measurement error due

Survey-based Experiments on White Racial Attitudes toward Residential Integration'

This paper renews the line of research into the effects of changes in survey question wording and form which occupied researchers during the 1940s. We suggest two reasons for the cessation of such research: the idiosyncratic nature of many of the items experimented with and the near exclusive focus on single-variable distributions. In the present study, the experiments are based on decisions that face all survey investigators: whether to use agree-disagree statements or forced choice items; whether to ask open or closed questions; whether and how to balance alternatives offered; whether to include a middle alternative; and whether or not to filterfor no opinion. Furthermore, we examine the consequences of these decisions not only for univariate distributions but also for an items relationship to education. The results from SRC national probability samples suggest thatfor thefirst two types, as well as for items involving variations in tone of word, the decisions may affect inferences about correlations with education. For the other three types the effects are restricted mainly to changes in marginals, although the no-opinion type shows a more limited kind of interaction with education. Finally, we present evidence that index construction is not an adequate solution to the question-wording problem.

Historical Analogies, Generational Effects, and Attitudes Toward War

Using residential integration as the main focus and experiments within national sample surveys as the primary method, this paper examines several theoretical explanations that have been offered for white opposition to government enforcement of black rights to open housing. Each of the following explanations receives some support: resistance to government coercion generally and especially to coercion from the federal government, concern over social class differences between blacks and whites, concern over the consequences of open-housing laws, and general antiblack prejudice. The weighting of and relations among these various factors is still to be determined, but it appears clear that no single, simple explanation will suffice. The paper also illustrates the value of combining experimentation with traditional survey design in substantive investigations.

The Measurement of a Middle Position in Attitude Surveys

Debates over initiating war with Iraq turned to a considerable extent on which of two analogies from the past were most relevant: World War II or the Vietnam War. Along with three other theoretical conditions, the debate provided an unusual opportunity to develop and assess important implications of Mannheims theory of generational effects. National data gathered before the war and during the war indicate that generational experience had a significant effect on which analogy was chosen as more relevant and that the analogy chosen had, in turn, a strong relation to supportfor or opposition to the war. However, the translation of generational experience into final support for or opposition to the war was weak. Reasons for the weak relationship are discussed.

Young White Adults: Did Racial Attitudes Change in the 1980s?.

Five split-ballot experiments, plus replications, were carried out in several national surveys to compare the effects of offering or omitting a middle alternative in forced-choice attitude questions. Explicitly offering a middle position significantly increases the size of that category, but tends not to otherwise affect univariate distribu- tions. The relation of intensity to the middle position is somewhat greater on Offered forms than on Omitted forms (less intense respondents being more affected by question form than those who feel more strongly), but in general form does not alter the relationship between an item and a number of other respondent characteristics. Finally, in one instance there is evidence that form can change the conclusion about whether

Context Effects on Survey Responses to Questions About Abortion

The widespread belief that racism among young white adults has increased in the 1980s is scrutinized using 12 racial policy questions from the General Social Surveys and the National Election Studies. Under the assumption that age effects can be treated as negligible, the article evaluates the importance of period and cohort effects in shaping the present racial attitudes of adults who have come of age since 1959. After outlining two possible patterns of differences among cohorts that could have resulted from the impact of historical circumstances during the formative years of early adulthood, the article concludes that there is no indication of decreasing tolerance among cohorts coming of age in the 1980s. Similarly the period effects are seldom significant over the years from 1984-90 and thus show no consistent decline in racial liberalism.