Who Is Asking? The Effect of the Interviewer’s Gender on Survey Responses

• In Event: Gender and Public Opinion

Abstract

Do interviewer’s characteristics influence the answers given by interviewees? In particular, are respondents more likely to profess support for women’s rights when the interviewer is a woman? While the ethnicity of the interviewer has been shown to influence respondent’s answers to questions related to race and ethnicity, there has been little work on how the gender of the interviewer influences the interviewees. In this paper, we test whether the interviewer’s gender influences respondents’ answers on questions related to women’s rights. We use data from the Afrobarometer, the Arab Barometer, American National Election Survey, Asian Barometer, and European Social Survey, which provides the gender of the interviewer as well as diverse questions related to women’s rights. We find that respondents are indeed more likely to answer than they support women’s right when the interviewer is a woman. The effect is particularly strong among male respondents. Finally, we find that the magnitude of the effect also varies across other country-level and individual-level characteristics. These results indicate that authors ought to account for the interviewer’s characteristics when using survey data. Failing to do so may introduce bias in the analysis, especially given that the error varies across respondents.

Authors

• Cristina Bodea, Michigan State University

• Christian Houle, Michigan State University

• Nikolaos Frantzeskakis, University of Birmingham