The interviewer effect when there is an education gap with the respondent: Evidence from a survey on biotechnology in Taiwan

Abstract

Survey methodologists are concerned that the interviewer’s characteristics may affect respondents’ answers. This paper investigates how the interviewer’s education interacts with the respondent’s perceptions and in turn affects the latter’s responses to hard questions in a biotechnology survey in Taiwan. Our results indicate that respondents with little education (junior high school or below) react to highly-educated interviewers by giving more substantive answers to both knowledge questions and attitude questions. These findings are consistent with findings in the literature on social psychology whereby the respondents can infer from the interviewer’s appearance and behavior whether the latter seems more knowledgeable than themselves, and that in interacting with someone with much more education, the one with little education senses his or her inferiority and tries to conform to the perceived expectations.

Introduction

The interviewer effect, which has been defined as “the tendency for answers provided by the respondent and recorded in a questionnaire to vary depending on which interviewer is assigned to the respondent,” (Groves and Magilavy, 1986, p. 251) has been widely investigated concerning the effect of the interviewer’s characteristics on various topics.¹ The past literature has found that the interviewer effect is more serious when respondents are asked sensitive questions, questions on issues that are charged with emotion, or questions that are complex or difficult to understand (Groves, 1989). The respondent in these circumstances might believe that in order to maintain a friendly interaction, he should act in accordance with the perceived expectations of the interviewer. Interviewer effects in studies on sensitive questions are mostly an outcome of the interviewer’s readily visible characteristics, such as skin color and gender. For example, for race-sensitive questions, the respondent tends to form his answer based on the skin color of the interviewer. While most studies on the interviewer effect have focused on sensitive questions, only a few have focused on hard-to-understand or complex questions.² These few studies have investigated the effects of interviewers’ education on the quality and quantity of responses, such as recall of social networks (Van Tilburg, 1998) and detailed information regarding hospital stays and medical expenditures (Berk and Bernstein, 1988), based on expectations that interviewers with more education would induce more responses of higher quality. However, most of these studies have found such effects insignificant.

In this paper, we propose that the interviewer’s education has another kind of effect on responses to hard-to-understand or complex questions. The effect takes place, not because of the better interviewing skills that better-educated interviewers are supposed to have, but rather through the mannerisms an interviewer presents to the respondent. We suggest that the perception of a well-educated person asking for one’s opinions regarding some profound topic propels the respondent to try to live up to the interviewer’s expectation—and give a substantive answer. We will use knowledge and attitude questions concerning biotechnology as an example.

Although it is not advisable to include in a survey difficult items or items that the respondent does not have any idea about (Dillman et al., 1993), as debates surrounding the development of biotechnology loom large, various nations and organizations, such as the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Taiwan, have used surveys to gauge people’s knowledge and attitudes in this regard. The results from such surveys have served as an important source of information for policy-makers on issues of biotechnology. However, most people, whether in developed countries or developing countries, are unfamiliar with the concepts of biotechnology or genetics.³ If Groves (1989) is correct in suggesting that the inclusion in a survey of difficult questions or questions that people do not have an answer for will only produce false impressions, the results from biotechnology surveys must be tested against interviewer effects before they are used as evidence for any argument concerning biotechnology.

This is the point of our study. In particular, we will investigate how, for difficult items, the interviewer’s educational level influences the respondent’s likelihood of admitting a lack of knowledge and revealing a lack of attitudes to issues concerning biotechnology. We argue that, when the gap between the interviewer’s education and the respondent’s education is wide, the latter will detect the gap and perceive the former as being much more knowledgeable. This, in turn, will induce the respondent to give more substantive answers to those hard questions in order to live up to the interviewer’s expectations as perceived.