You Know What I Know: Interviewer Knowledge Effects in Subjective Expectation Elicitation

Directly eliciting individuals’ subjective beliefs via surveys is increasingly popular in social science research, but doing so via face-to-face surveys has an important downside: the interviewer’s knowledge of the topic may spill over onto the respondent’s recorded beliefs. Using a randomized exper...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Demography 2021-02, Vol.58 (1), p.1-29
Main Authors: Kerwin, Jason T., Reynoso, Natalia Ordaz
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beliefs
Elicitation
Humans
Interviews
Knowledge
METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES IN DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH
Motivation
Polls & surveys
Recruitment
Respondents
Social research
Social sciences
Surveys
Surveys and Questionnaires
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Summary:Directly eliciting individuals’ subjective beliefs via surveys is increasingly popular in social science research, but doing so via face-to-face surveys has an important downside: the interviewer’s knowledge of the topic may spill over onto the respondent’s recorded beliefs. Using a randomized experiment that used interviewers to implement an information treatment, we show that reported beliefs are significantly shifted by interviewer knowledge. Trained interviewers primed respondents to use the exact numbers used in the training, nudging them away from higher answers; recorded responses decreased by about 0.3 standard deviations of the initial belief distribution. Furthermore, respondents with stronger prior beliefs were less affected by interviewer knowledge. We suggest corrections for this issue from the perspectives of interviewer recruitment, survey design, and experiment setup.
ISSN:0070-3370
1533-7790
1533-7790
DOI:10.1215/00703370-8932274