Surveys on Surveys: Limitations and Potentialities

Data from two surveys on surveys in Waterloo, Ontario were used to assess attitudes toward the survey. Questions in the two surveys inquired into motives for refusing/consenting to interviews; attitudes toward past experience with surveys; likes/ dislikes of form of contact, question format, and topic; perception of social pressure to respond to surveys; views on the social legitimacy of polling and on legislative controls for surveying. The surveys also collected response histories. Analysis of the attitudes began with a factor analysis of 12 items, which identified four factors descending from the general to the particular. It was found that attitudes are related to exposure to surveying, i.e., the more times a person reports requests for survey cooperation, the more unfavorable is his or her attitude toward the method. On the whole, however, the author finds that the evidence presented belies pessimistic views about surveys on surveys. John Goyder is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This article is a revision of a paper presented at the 40th Annual AAPOR Conference, May 16-19, 1985. Research assistants on the record-linking portion of the study were Joti Sekhon, Christine Hutchinson, Ella Haley, and Joan Lyons. Twenty-one students enrolled in Sociology 282 in Winter 1982 collected the 1982 survey data. Patricia Anderson, Helen Chapman, and Joan Lyons conducted telephone interviews for the 1985 replication. Marnie Goyder was coder on the replication. The work reported herein has been supported by the University of Waterloo Faculty of Arts Resource Fund, the UW-SSHRC Small Grants Subcommittee, and by an SSHRC Leave Fellowship. The hospitality of the Social and Political Sciences Committee, Cambridge University, in granting the author Visiting Scholar privileges in 1985-86, greatly assisted the completion of the manuscript. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 50 27-41 ? 1986 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press 0033-362X/86/0050-27/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.112 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:02:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms