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

From Michael Schober

Professor of psychology and dean of the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research

Although I believe that real progress has been made since Schuman and Presser's seminal work first came out, I'm not personally convinced that we have complete solutions to any of the problems considered there. I think we have more data points, and I think we have some useful systematizations that have moved our thinking forward. I'm a fan of many of the psychological formulations in Tourangeau, Rips, and Rasinski's book, The Psychology of Survey Response, and consider them, as well as the general thrust of formulating the questions in terms of the psychology of respondents (the CASM movement), to be steps forward.

But I can't say, as I look down the book's table of contents, that I feel I could confidently tell, say, a novice survey designer that we now understand the dynamics of any of those issues so straightforwardly that we can recommend how, exactly, a particular question should be worded on a particular survey. What we do have is a much better sense of the many potentially relevant considerations that survey designers need to think about.

My own view (developed with Fred Conrad, Herb Clark, and other colleagues) is that in working toward a general framework that makes sense of Schuman and Presser’s phenomena, it is fruitful to think of the question-answer process not only from an individual cognitivist view, but also from a collaborative interactivist view. The idea is that when respondents answer survey questions, either as presented by human interviewers or in self-administered formats, they are engaged in a complex form of dialogue, the features of which can help account for some of Schuman and Presser’s effects. Effects of prior questions can thus, for example, be conceived as related to the effects of the buildup of common ground in nonsurvey conversations. Various scholars have made versions of this argument, including Norbert Schwarz and colleagues and a number of writers in the Wiley Standardization and Tacit Knowledge volume. Fred Conrad and I have carried out some studies investigating interaction in interviews that reflect this view, and the papers below present overviews of the position:

Schober, M. F. 1999. Making sense of questions: An interactional approach. In Cognition and survey research, ed. M. G. Sirken, D. J. Hermann, S. Schechter, N. Schwarz, J. M. Tanur, and R. Tourangeau. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 77-93.

Schober, M. F., and F. G. Conrad. 2002. A collaborative view of standardized survey interviews. In Standardization and tacit knowledge: Interaction and practice in the survey interview, ed. D. Maynard, H. Houtkoop-Steenstra, N. C. Schaeffer, and J. van der Zouwen. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 67-94.

Schober, M. F. 2005. Conceptual alignment in conversation. In Other minds: How humans bridge the divide between self and others, ed. B. F. Malle and S. D. Hodges. New York: Guilford Press, 239-52.

Conrad, F. G., M. F. Schober, and T. Coiner. 2007. Bringing features of dialogue to web surveys. Applied Cognitive Psychology, in press.

Conrad, F. G., M. F. Schober, and W. Dijkstra. In press. Cues of communication difficulty in telephone interviews. In Advances in telephone survey methodology, ed. J. M. Lepkowski, C. Tucker, M. Brick, E. de Leeuw, L. Japec, P. Lavrakas, M. Link, and R. Sangster. New York: Wiley.