SUBSEQUENT QUESTIONS MAY INFLUENCE ANSWERS TO PRECEDING QUESTIONS IN MAIL SURVEYS

Data of a mode experiment demonstrate that the emergence of context effects may be independent of question order under mail survey conditions. Under telephone interview conditions, substantively related questions affected responses to the target question only when asked first. However, the same questions affected responses under mail survey conditions independent of whether they preceded or followed the target question. One of the key differences between modes of data collection pertains to the temporal order in which the material is presented (see Schwarz et al. 1991). Telephone and face-to-face interviews have a strict sequential organization, and respondents have to process the information in the temporal succession in which it is presented by the interviewer. As a result, preceding questions may influence answers given to subsequent questions, whereas subsequent questions cannot influence the answers already provided to preceding questions. In contrast, selfadministered questionnaires do not have a strict sequential ordering. Although the questions are presented in a predetermined order, respondents may read ahead, go back and forth between related questions, or may change previous answers. Accordingly, a selfadministered questionnaire format may attenuate the impact of question order. This, however, does not imply that the content of related The reported research was supported by grant SWFOO44 6 from the Bundeminister fur Forschung und Technologie of the Federal Republic of Germany to Norbert Schwarz. Both authors were affiliated with ZUMA, Mannheim, Federal Republic of Germany, at the time of the reported research. NORBERT SCHWARZ is now professor of psychology and research scientist, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. HANS-J. HIPPLER is now director of media and market research with the Gesellschaft fur Zeitungsmarketing, Frankfurt. Address correspondence to Norbert Schwarz, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 59:93-97 ? 1995 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All rights reserved. 0033-362X/95/5901-0004$02.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.255 on Mon, 01 Aug 2016 05:44:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 94 Norbert Schwarz and Hans-J. Hippler questions may not affect the answers given. Rather, it suggests that the emergence of context effects may be independent of question order in a self-administered format, allowing for influences of preceding as well as following questions. In line with this hypothesis, Bishop et al. (1988) observed that the operation of the norm of evenhandedness depended on question order under telephone, but not under self-administered, conditions. Replicating Schuman and Ludwig's (1983) Japanese trade items with a German sample, they asked respondents to report their opinion on (a) limiting Japanese imports to Germany and (b) limiting German exports to Japan. Under telephone interview conditions, German respondents were significantly more likely to favor limiting Japanese imports to Germany than they were to favor limiting German exports to Japan when each question was asked in the first position. However, support for limitations on German exports to Japan increased when this question was preceded by the question about restricting Japanese imports to Germany. This presumably reflects that endorsing restrictions on Japanese imports to Germany evoked a norm of evenhandedness (Schuman and Ludwig 1983). Thus, the data under telephone interview conditions replicated Schuman and Ludwig's findings based on a U.S. sample. But when respondents were asked these same questions under selfadministered conditions, the order in which they were presented had no significant effect on the results. Rather, these respondents reported considerable support for limiting German exports to Japan under both order conditions, suggesting that the norm of evenhandedness was evoked independent of question order. Data from a U.S. sample followed the same pattern, although the differences did not reach significance (see Bishop et al. 1988). These findings suggest that respondents either read ahead or returned to the previous question once they encountered the subsequent one. The latter may be particularly likely when the subsequent question draws attention to strongly held norms that have clear implications for a preceding question, as is the case for the Japanese trade items. Whether order-independent context effects would be observed in mail surveys under other conditions is an open issue. To address this issue, we assessed the emergence of question order effects under telephone and mail survey conditions in a mode experiment, using questions that do not evoke the norm of evenhandedness.