Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured 241
Aunger’s interviewing style, or because informants generally told the anthropologist
different things than they told local interviewers, or because there is
something special about informants in the Ituri forest? We’ll know when we
add variables to Aunger’s study and repeat it in many cultures, including our
own.
The Deference Effect
When people tell you what they think you want to know, in order not to
offend you, that’s called the deference effect or the acquiescence effect.
Aunger may have experienced this in Zaire. In fact, it happens all the time,
and researchers have been aware of the problem for a long, long time. In 1958,
Lenski and Leggett embedded two contradictory questions in a face-to-face
interview, half an hour apart. Respondents were asked whether they agreed or
disagreed with the following two statements: (1) It’s hardly fair to bring children
into the world, the way things look for the future; (2) Children born today
have a wonderful future to look forward to. Just 5% of Whites agreed with
both statements compared to 20% of African Americans. Lenski and Leggett
concluded that this was the deference effect in action: Blacks were four times
more likely than Whites to agree to anything, even contradictory statements,
because the interviewers were almost all white and of higher perceived status
than the respondents (Lenski and Leggett 1960).
When the questions are about race, the deference effect also works for African
Americans interviewing Whites. In 1989, Douglas Wilder, an African
American, ran against Marshall Coleman, who is white, for the governorship
of Virginia. Preelection polls showed that Wilder was far ahead, but in the
end, he won by only a slim margin. When white voters were asked on the
telephone whom they would vote for, they were more likely to claim Wilder
as their choice if the interviewer was African American than if the interviewer
was white. This effect accounted for as much as 11% of Wilder’s support
(Finkel et al. 1991). This finding has serious consequences for the future of
election polls in the United States, as more and more elections involve competition
between white and African American candidates.
Reese et al. (1986:563) tested the deference effect in a telephone survey of
Anglo and Mexican American respondents. When asked specifically about
their cultural preference, 58% of Hispanic respondents said they preferred
Mexican American culture over other cultures, irrespective of whether the
interviewer was Anglo or Hispanic. Just 9% of Anglo respondents said they
preferred Mexican American culture when asked by Anglo interviewers, but
23% said they preferred Mexican American culture when asked by Hispanic
interviewers.