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The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the Hollingshead Index of Social Position (I.S.P.) is correlated with class awareness and class identification, two principal components of class consciousness. Comparative data are introduced from the Hollingshead and Redlich (1958) community study of New Haven, Connecticut, and an investigation by this writer (1963) of an urban Pennsylvania community, hereafter referred to as Twin City. Both studies use an objective index (I.S.P.) to estimate positions individuals occupy in the status structure of the community, and both correlate class awareness and class identification with class placement by this index. The interviews for the present study were conducted in a middle-sized Pennsylvania city, with a population of approximately 75,000, in the summer of 1961. The number of completed interview schedules, from which data analyses were derived, was set at 1,811. The social position which individuals and families occupy in the Twin City status structure was determined according to the modification of Hollingshead's three-factor I.S.P. All of the sample households enumerated in the interview schedule were stratified by class through use of this index. The collected data used to determine the I.S.P. for each household consisted of the education and occupation of the head of the household plus the ecological location of the dwelling unit in which the respondent resided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No research results are any better than the quality of the data. As scientists, survey researchers must share the problems of measuring, understanding, and controlling bias in their data. The potential sources of bias in survey research are many and varied. They may appear at any one or all of the several stages of the data gathering process. For example, they may occur in the selection of the sample, in the development of measuring instruments, in securing the responses of the persons in the sample, in the respondents replies, in the recording of the responses, and in processing the recorded responses. Even beyond the data collection process, bias may occur, as in the misapplication of statistics and in the interpretation of data. Progress has been made toward identifying and controlling sources of bias in some of these stages of the research process. Perhaps most progress has been made in the sampling stage and in the statistical application stage. Much advance has been made also in the reduction of error at the instrumentation stage. However, considerable work remains to be done on the problems of error control, especially biasing error, at all stages of the research between instrumentation and statistical analysis. This includes getting full response from the sample, accurate answers to the questions asked, and accurate recording and processing of responses. The accumulation of bias from these and other possible sources may be referred to as total or aggregate bias. The total bias may then be divided for analytical purposes into the following types: (1) sampling bias, (2) instrumentation bias, (3) non-response bias, (4) respondent bias, (5) interviewer bias, and (6) processing bias. This paper is an effort to deal with the problem of respondent bias in survey research. That respondent bias is a potent force in diminishing the validity and reliability of results from survey research is well recognized. The recognition of this condition has led to an enormous amount of activity aimed at isolating factors which determine this weakness of research results. These studies, by and large, have dealt with the problem of determining the direction of respondent bias, its magnitude, the speearle variables which produce respondent bias, and the effect of such bias on research results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how fathers perceive the economic costs and benefits of raising children and how these perceptions influence preferred number of children and contraceptive use. Interviews were conducted for this study in 1969 with an island-wide sample of 2200 Taiwanese husbands. Analysis indicates that a complex of cost and benefit considerations has an appreciable net effect on reproductive attitudes and behaviour, after socio-economic status and demographic characteristics have been taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on sex effects in the interviewing of young adults. Although periodic assessments of the perils of using an interview format to collect data have been made, many social scientists feel that the advantages of the interview outweigh its disadvantages in a wide variety of research situations. Incumbent on those who utilize the interview, however, are the responsibilities of identifying the situations where problems in measurement could occur in the interview, as well as ascertaining the extent of these problems should they occur. The focus of this paper is on the first of these responsibilities-identifying situations where measurement problems can arise due to the effect, in this case, of the interviewer on the subjects' responses. In a number of previous studies interviewer effects have been shown to be related to ascriptive characteristics of the interviewer such as age, sex, and race, as well as to somewhat less apparent traits including the interviewer's social class, his own attitudes about the interview items, and his psychological temperament for the interviewer's role. Other researchers have approached the problem of interview validity from a different angle by trying to identify which types of questions were most susceptible to interview effects.

This paper describes certain quota sampling procedures and attempts to show that they are very close to traditional probability sampling. Quotas are shown to depend on availability for interviewing and evidence is presented to show that sex, age, and employment status are reasonable predictors of availability. Quota sampling methods are not unbiased but data are presented which suggest that the bias is generally of the order of 3 to 5 per cent. It is shown, however, that the cost differentials between these quota samples and call-back samples are small. The major advantage of this new procedure may well be the speed with which interviewing may be completed during crises such as the Kennedy assassination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For various reasons individuals in a sample survey may prefer not to confide to the interviewer the correct answers to certain questions. In such cases the individuals may elect not to reply at all or to reply with incorrect answers. The resulting evasive answer bias is ordinarily difficult to assess. In this paper it is argued that such bias is potentially removable through allowing the interviewee to maintain privacy through the device of randomizing his response. A randomized response method for estimating a population proportion is presented as an example. Unbiased maximum likelihood estimates are obtained and their mean square errors are compared with the mean square errors of conventional estimates under various assumptions about the underlying population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the results of an investigation into the choice of appropriate words in questions used in studies of the reactions to such factors of external environment, such as noise and air pollution, as have a deleterious effect on the individuals exposed to them. One hundred interviewees participated in the investigation; all of them were students of sociology. Only one questionnaire was available at a time; first, form 1 was filled in, then form 2, and finally form 3. The forms were filled in by the interviewees independently; they also seem to have understood and followed the instructions given, as no form was discarded for being incomplete or, from a formal point of view, for being obviously filled in erroneously. The results of the investigation shows that for the stimuli of noise the terms chosen by the majority were disturbing and irritating. However, as far as noise from street and road traffic is concerned, the terms irritating and troublesome were chosen by almost the same number of interviewees. The dominating term of reaction for the stimuli noise from shouting children and noise from gurgling pipes is irritating, whereas disturbing is the predominant term of reaction for the other noise stimuli comprised by the investigation. In all the three cases mote than 50 percent considered unpleasant the most adequate term of reaction for the stimuli of offensive smell.

The article presents a report of the occurrence of "interviewer effect" in connection with a medicohygienic survey. The "interviewer effect" may be defined as the discrepancies attributable to the person conducting the interviews. In many interview surveys, however, this source of error is not taken into account. Comparison is made between the replies obtained by 14 well-trained interviewers The questionnaire had two main sections--a general and a medical. The former comprised personal data, questions concerning profession, education, conditions at work, housing conditions, house-work, and questions on defense matters. The medical section contained 27 questions, but as some were subdivided the actual total was greater. An interviewer effect was found in half of the questions investigated. The magnitude of the interviewer effect was such that under unfavorable circumstances it would probably have hazarded the main purpose of the survey. Emphasis was placed on the necessity of considering the possibility of interviewer effect in future surveys of similar type.

This study investigates the relationship of interviewer characteristics to the responses of their interviewees in a survey in a relatively sensitive area—drinking practices. Generally, respondents seem to have reacted to easily ascertainable characteristics of the interviewers, such as sex, status (as measured by education, occupation, and clothing), and religion. The attitudes of the interviewer toward his interviewing were also related to respondents' reported drinking. It is concluded that interviewing is a social relationship of brief duration in which the respondent's performance reflects norms that tend to emerge based on the information each of the participants is able to learn about the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviewing is a most widely used and accepted tool for information gathering in the social sciences. Nevertheless, many social science researchers have indicated the considerable problems in its use. In particular, they have pointed to, and have cautioned others to be on guard against, the many cultural and personality influences which impinge on the "ongoing social processes within the humans who operate in the interviewing situations of various types." Many have reported on the disturbing influences and distortions growing out of the social interaction between respondent and interviewer; they have pointed to language barriers, status, class, and educational differences, ethnic differences, sex and age influences, residential differences, and a host of other intervening variables which produce interviewer effect and bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers news briefs related to science in the U.S. In November 1958, the "Daily Express of London" have published an interview with Klaus Fuchs, an atomic scientist who is serving a 14-year sentence in England for giving atomic weapon information to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the formation of the Federal Council for Science and Technology was announced on December 27, 1958.