The Biasing Effect of Interviewer Expectations on Survey Result

An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that interviewer expectations as to the organized 'structure of the respondent's attitudes distort survey results through errors in recording. It indicates that interviewers often record the answer they expect to hear, rather than the answer which is actually given. These expectation effects also tend to reduce the validity of the results and, in this instance at least, interviewer expectations had a more powerful effect upon the results than did their own ideological preferences. Harry L. Smith, formerly associated with the National Opinion Research Center, is now a price economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Herbert Hyman, Research Associate of the National Opinion Research Center, is spending the academic year 1950-51 as Visiting Professor at the University of Oslo, Norway.