Interviewer Expectation Effects: A Replication and Extension

Interviewers' evaluations of the general difficulty of a survey have no effect on the cooperation rate they obtain, but do affect responses to individual questions. Although these effects are not large, interviewers who expect more difficulty with a study, or who expect certain parts of it to be difficult to ask, tend to get higher nonresponse rates tosensitive questions and lower estimates of sensitive behavior. Such expectations affected one of the experimental manipulations in the informed consent study, but not enough to account for the effects of the experimental variable. Eleanor Singer is a Senior Research Associate at the Columbia Center for the Social Sciences and Editor of The Public Opinion Quarterly. Luane Kohnke-Aguirre is Sampling Manager at Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, Inc. Charles F. Cannell, Program Director atthe Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, refereed the evaluation of this article.