Questions and Answers: Schuman and Presser's Public Opinion Classic

From Norman Bradburn

Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, the Harris School of Public Policies, the Graduate School of Business, and the College, University of Chicago

A lot of theoretical and empirical work has gone on the past twenty-five years, and I think it fair to say that we have pretty good explanations for some of the phenomena Schuman and Presser discuss in Questions & Answers, but there is still a lot of tidying up to do. The basic theoretic structure is a cognitive one which has evolved from Cannell et al., through Strack and Martin, Tourangeau and Rasinski to the latest version in Tourangeau, Rips, and Rasinski. Krosnick's satisficing model (1991) is somewhat to the side, but I think adds a motivational component that complements the others.

Let me go through the table of contents:

Question order. I think we are in pretty good shape here. The various theories do a good job in demonstrating how context affects understanding of the question and activates various schema. Question order is an important part of the context, and, depending on the content of the questions, the order can affect comprehension or retrieval. More empirical work is needed before we identify exactly which questions will create important order effects, but the broad outlines are pretty clear: General questions—e.g., abortion—are affected by more specific questions—e.g., abortion if mother's life is in danger—but not vice versa. Questions that invoke a familiar norm—e.g., reciprocity—will affect later questions that imply the norm, but with a less favorable object—e.g., fighting for the Nazis. Chapters 4-6 of Sudman, Bradburn, and Schwarz, Thinking About Answers, goes over a lot of this ground, including order of answer category effects.

Open versus closed questions. Less has been done here, since open questions have virtually disappeared from practice. I think the various theories that draw on cognitive theories of memory and activation of associations can pretty well explain what is going on. There are few empirical demonstrations but, I think the 1989 Tourangeau, Rasinski, Bradburn, and D'Andrade article, "Belief Accessibility and Context Effects in Attitude Measurement," demonstrates how it would work.

No opinion. I don't know that much has been done in giving a good explanation for the effect of giving or not giving an NA option, although I think the argument and studies about order effects in the response alternatives literature would point one in the right direction (see chapter 6 of Thinking about Answers).

Attitudes versus nonattitudes. I think the Tourangeau, Rips, and Rasinski belief-sampling model, described in chapter 6 of The Psychology of Survey Response, does a pretty good job of making sense of this issue.

Measuring middle positions. I think less has been done in explaining what goes on here. Chapter 8 in The Psychology of Survey Response is relevant, and here Krosnick's satisficing model could come into play.

Balance and imbalance in questions. I think this is a subtopic of the context literature and works rather like the mechanisms talked about in explaining the order effects.

Acquiescence. Carol Stocking did a good job in showing that a lot of what we think of as acquiescence is really about the normative structure surrounding the interview, or at least it was some time ago when surveys were not so common. Given the declining response rates, acquiescence may be replaced by refusals, soft or hard. Still it continues to exist. My explanation is a social interaction model based on role theory, but that model has not been picked up by others—although I haven't seen anyone argue against it, either, so I don't know if that means that people accept it, or whether it is just seen as irrelevant.

Intensity, strength, and crystallization. I think this bundle of issues is pretty well accounted for by the belief-sampling theory and related views about chronically accessible as opposed to temporarily accessible thoughts.

I guess the bottom line is that I think the developing cognitive theories are bringing considerable order into the explanations of the phenomena Schuman and Presser brought to prominent attention twenty-five years ago. Some of the things that looked like disparate issues really are the result of similar underlying cognitive processes, and, as we do more work on them, we will get a firmer handle on them in ways that lead to improvements in questionnaires and being able to know in advance when questions are going to cause problems. I wrote a paper a few years ago for Survey Methodology that summarizes most of what I know on these issues.