From Elicitation of Beliefs to Observation of Readings in Opinion Research

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Abstract

Conventional approaches to opinion research imply a theoretical model of belief elicitation in which a respondent’s preexisting, discrete, and durable thoughts on particular issues are available for extraction by survey or interview instruments, to varying degrees of precision. The goal of these methods is typically to draw out “authentic” or “true” opinions with a minimum of distortion caused by interviewer bias, social desirability bias, issues with question wording or ordering, and many other potential sources of error. Drawing from Ann Swidler’s (1986) cultural toolkit theory and Umberto Eco’s (1981) semiotics, I propose repurposing the existing but underutilized method of cognitive interviewing to observe research participants perform the interpretive labor necessary to produce readings of vignette texts. By shifting the focus of opinion research away from eliciting unobservable “authentic” beliefs, researchers can focus on empirically examining the cultural work of interpretation as it is directed toward specific textual stimuli.

Author

• Ken Cai Kowalski, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill