Context and Contiguity in Survey Questionnaires

THE IMPORTANCE of context effects in survey questionnaires has been pointed up in several recent reports.' In the present paper we start from one of the most firmly established such effects and address a further important issue: to what degree are context effects due to placing questions in contiguous positions, with no intervening items, as against having them simply appear in the same questionnaire. Looked at from a practical standpoint, can investigators reduce context effects by interposing neutral items between questions that are known or thought likely to influence one another? We focus on a pair of items concerning Communist and American reporters where the context effect has been shown to be both strong and stable over time: