THAT WHICH WE CALL WELFARE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL SWEETER AN ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF QUESTION WORDING ON RESPONSE PATTERNS

Responses to survey questions are dependent on the words used in the questions. Sometimes the alteration of words can completely change the response distribution without obviously changing the meaning or intent of the question. This situation occurs when "welfare" is used instead of "poor." In all contexts examined "welfare" produced much more negative and less generous responses than "poor." In addition the two terms appear to tap slightly different dimensions with "welfare" accessing notions of waste and bureaucracy that are untapped or tapped much less by "poor." Although the order of words in a question and the alteration of "small, simple" words in the query and response categories can alter the perceived meaning and response distribution of a question (Schuman and Presser, 1981; Payne, 1951), it is generally believed that abstract "concept" words that specify the object being evaluated or the state along which the object is being evaluated are particularly susceptible to variation. Fee (1979, 1981), for example, has shown that abstract words in common use in the mass media often mean very different things to different people. "Big government," for example, tapped four major definitional clusters: (1) welfare-statism, (2) corporatism, (3) federal control, and (4) bureaucracy. Similarly Smith (1981) found that "confidence" was defined in four distinct ways as (1) trust, (2) capability, (3) attention to common good, and (4) following respondent's self-interest. TOM W. SMITH iS Senior Study Director at the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago. This research was done for the General Social Survey project directed by James A. Davis and Tom W. Smith. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. SES-8118731. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 51:75-83 ( 1987 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press / 0033-362X/87/0051-01/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.78 on Tue, 21 Jun 2016 07:06:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms