Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

242 Chapter 9
Questions about gender and gender roles produce deference effects, too.
When you ask people in the United States how most couples actually divide
child care, men are more likely than women to say that men and women share
this responsibility—if the interviewer is a man (Kane and McCaulay 1993:11).
Do women have too much influence, just the right amount of influence, or
too little influence in today’s society? When asked this question by a male
interviewer, men are more likely to say that women have too much influence;
when asked the same question by a female interviewer, men are more likely
to say that women have too little influence.
And similarly for women: When asked by a female interviewer, women are
more likely to say that men have too much influence than when asked by a
male interviewer (Kane and Macaulay 1993:14–15). Lueptow et al. (1990)
found that women gave more liberal responses to female interviewers than to
male interviewers on questions about gender roles. Men’s attitudes about gender
roles were, for the most part, unaffected by the gender of the interviewer—
except that highly educated men gave the most liberal responses about gender
roles to female interviewers.
‘‘It appears,’’ said Lueptow et al., ‘‘that educated respondents of both sexes
are shifting their answers toward the socially desirable positions they think are
held by female interviewers’’ (p. 38). Attitudes about gender roles sure are
adaptable.
Questions that aren’t race related are not affected much by the race or the
ethnicity of either the interviewer or the respondent. The Center for Applied
Linguistics conducted a study of 1,472 bilingual children in the United States.
The children were interviewed by Whites, Cuban Americans, Chicanos,
Native Americans, or Chinese Americans. Weeks and Moore (1981) compared
the scores obtained by white interviewers with those obtained by various ethnic
interviewers and it turned out that the ethnicity of the interviewer didn’t
have a significant effect.
Whenever you have multiple interviewers, keep track of the race, ethnicity,
and gender of the interviewer and test for response effects. Identifying sources
of bias is better than not identifying them, even if you can’t eliminate them.
(For more on the deference effect and the social desirability effect, see Krysan
and Couper 2003.)
The Third-Party-Present Effect
We sort of take it for granted that interviews are private conversations, conducted
one on one, but in fact, many face-to-face interviews have at least one
third party in the room, often the spouse or partner of the person being interviewed.
Does this affect how people respond to questions? Sometimes it does,