Political Information Processing: Question Order and Context Effects

In: Political behavior, Volume 4, Issue 2, p. 177-200

Abstract

Independent field experiments in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area indicate that changes in question order & context may account for an apparently precipitous decline of interest in politics at the time of the Center for Political Studies 1978 American National Election Study. Evidence from a question order experiment with the Survey Research Center/Center for Political Studies "feeling thermometers" also suggests that such contextual artifacts may not be atypical. Indeed, because of the many changes in the context & organization of the election studies over the years, context effects represent plausible rival hypotheses for a number of inexplicable shifts & trends in the time-series. In testing these hypotheses, an information-processing model of how Rs infer their political "states of mind" from observations of their own question-answering behavior in the survey interview are derived & validated. In addition, the wide applicability of the model to substantive problems in the discipline & its implications for the survey-based paradigm in political behavior research are illustrated. 4 Tables, 1 Appendix, 28 References. HA.