Do Surveys Overstate Public Concerns?

Abstract Because the item, How concerned are you about...? asks respondents to indicate their level of concern about an issue, some respondents may sense it assumes they are con-cerned or should be concerned about the issue. Using a filter question to first determine if people are concerned about the issue before asking for their degree of concern may help solve this problem. To test this hypothesis, a split-ballot experiment was embedded in a national random digit dialing telephone survey on food-related issues. For the four items included in the experi-ment, the group receiving the filter versions of the questions gave roughly double the percentages of not concerned responses as the group receiving standard items, and the filter group also gave fewer responses at the upper end of the response scale. Research on the social uses of language shows that questions often contain presuppositions (i.e., unstated assumptions) about their in-tended respondents (Clark 1985; Grice 1975; Luch and Thomas 1990; Myers 1984). How long does it take you to drive to work? assumes the respondent has a job, while What did you do after jogging? presupposes the respondent went for a run. Presuppositions are uni-versal elements of human discourse that allow people to communicate with an economical use of words. They are pervasive in all forms of social intercourse, including standardized surveys (Hippler and Schwarz 1987; Suchman and Jordan 1990). The wording of some questions may suggest they are based on pre-An earlier draft of this article was presented at the forty-seventh annual meeting of the