Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

250 Chapter 9
the 3-month question. The assumption here is that increasing the amount of the
behavior reported also increases its accuracy.
The Social Desirability Effect
Hadaway et al. (1998) went to a large Protestant church and found 115 people
in attendance at the Sunday school. On Monday morning, when Hadaway
et al. polled the whole church membership, 181 people claimed to have been
in Sunday school the previous day. Head-count experiments like this one typically
produce estimates of church attendance that are 55%–59% of what people
report (T. W. Smith 1998).
This social desirability effect is influenced by the way you ask the question.
Major surveys, like the Gallup Poll, ask something like: ‘‘How often do
you attend religious services?’’ Then they give the people choices like ‘‘once
a week, once a month, seldom, never.’’ Presser and Stinson (1998) asked people
on Monday to list everything they had done from ‘‘midnight Saturday to
midnight last night.’’ When they asked the question this way, 29% of respondents
said that they had gone to church. Asking ‘‘How often do you go to
church?’’ produced estimates of 37%–45%. (This is a 28%–55% difference in
reported behavior and is statistically very significant.)
Informant accuracy remains a major problem. Gary Wells and his colleagues
(2003) showed a video of a staged crime to 253 students. Then they
showed the students a photo lineup of six people and asked the students to
pick out the culprit. Every single student picked one of the six photos, but
there was a small problem: the culprit wasn’t in the six photos. We need a lot
more research about the rules of inference that people use when they respond
to questions about where they’ve been, who they were with, and what they
were doing.