Carryover Effects in Attitude Surveys

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Answers to attitude questions in surveys can vary markedly depending on the preceding items in the questionnaire. This study concerns such context effects. More than 1,100 respondents were asked about six target issues in a telephone survey. Before answering the target questions, most of the respondents had been asked about one of two sets of related issues; the remainder received unrelated, “neutral” context items. For five of the six target issues, the two groups receiving different sets of context items differed significantly in their answers to the target questions. However, only one of the substantive context groups differed significantly from the group that received the neutral context items. Additional results indicated that context effects were larger when respondents reported that their beliefs about the target issue were both mixed and important. Coding of openended responses to follow-up questions suggested that the context items may have changed how respondents thought about the target issues.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: