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The purpose of this article is to study the effectiveness of the three techniques commonly employed for collecting data to be used in evaluating personality adjustment. The interview technique portrays the personality appraisement approach resorted to by most specialists as psychologists, clinicians, and counselors. This technique endeavors to diagnose personality characteristics on the basis of verbal responses, appearance, individual testing, personal contact, and the like. The interview technique as used in this study consisted of a personalized administration of each test during which time ample opportunity was given the student to discuss his understanding of the test situations and the nature of responses made to them. People frequently question the effectiveness of many of the personality evaluating techniques utilized in guidance programs. Since guidance practice generally relies upon the use of one personality evaluating technique, it is essential to know which technique provides the most effective diagnosis of student adjustment not only in the school situation but in other environments as well.

The paper describes a study covering 409 workers in the assembly factory of a large Belgian automobile company. It was desired to identify the factors which contributed, in both a positive and a negative way, to the attitudes of the men toward their work. The technique adopted was a free, but standardised, interview with each man whilst working on the line with him, the research worker having previously been trained and having worked on the line as an assembler. The data were subjected to an analysis of variance, and factors at work groups lying at the extremes of the distributions are discussed, reasons for their contribution to the total variance being drawn from the interview data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Efforts to maintain a consistent self-image may be affected by whether or not a person anticipates that the self-evaluative information he presents to another person about some ability will subsequently be validated in the course of overt performances. The prediction that self-consistent behavior will be more likely to occur among American female undergraduates when such self-revealing events are anticipated than when they are not anticipated was tested in an experiment which utilized Aronson and Carlsmith's (1) expectation- performance paradigm and varied whether or not an interview would follow the experiment. The prediction was not supported by performance changes on a test of the ability in question but received tentative support from subjects' responses to a self-evaluative question. A self-consistency interpretation of the performance-change data was questioned in light of recent experiments on the effects of differential recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role-deviant respondent sets and resulting bias, their detection and control in the survey interview. Research interviews are conducted for the collection of data relevant to certain variables of interest to the investigator. The data are coded, translated, or interpreted into estimated values for these variables and so mediate between the phenomenal referents of the variables and their value estimates. Research-interview data proper are collected in the form of answers to questions. Whatever tends to divert a respondent's answers from being maximally responsive, recordable, honest, understandable, considered, and complete, is a possible source of bias. Between the statement of a question by the interviewer and the statement of an answer by the respondent, a great deal of mental activity may take place in the respondent. He must grasp the meaning of the question, select and assemble the relevant knowledge available through perception or memory, formulate a message to achieve whatever effects he intends, and verbalize this message as his answer.

Demographic and psychological correlates of Srole's anomie scale were investigated in a VA domiciliary. Analyses of the data from interviews of an original and cross-validation sample, totalling 176 members, supported hypotheses based on the findings of Bell and produced a multiple correlation coefficient of .68 between anomie and eight predictor variables. The negative relationships between anomie and social affiliation, education, and contact with friends and relatives appeared to be the major correlates of the high mean level of anomie found in the domiciliary population. An analysis of partial Beta values indicated that the positive relationship of chronological age and the negative relationship of social participation with anomie did not hold when variance due to the three major correlates of anomie was partialled out. The findings were discussed in terms of relevant theory and the characteristics of institutional living situations in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the relative advantages and limitations of the panel and successive-sample techniques in the analysis of opinion change. In the application of polling techniques to the analysis of opinion changes it is possible to proceed either by administering comparable items at different times to different samples drawn by the same sampling procedure from the same population, or by repeated use of the same sample, or by some combination of the two procedures. The main theoretical advantage in the use of different samples, as contrasted with the panel technique, arises from the consideration that if a sample is exposed to two or more interviews, the earlier interview experience might affect subsequent interview responses. While the possibility of serial effects of some sort is present whenever subjects are exposed to successive interviews, the danger of error from this source can be considerably reduced if it can be shown empirically that the magnitude of such serial effects is small, or that their magnitude can be estimated with some accuracy for the purposes of interpretation of the data.

In order to test Rorschach's hypothesis that perception in Rorschach space is related to personality, a functional relationship between the response, R, and the various parameters that may influence this response was developed: R - f(S, T, O, E, C, P), where the bracketed parameters refer to the objectively recognizable factors which can be manipulated or controlled experimentally, while P refers to personality factors which may influence the response over and above the influences attributable to the first set of five factors. Since we have not yet been able to measure the first five parameters, the hypothesis attributed to Rorschach cannot yet be tested. A concrete model which may be helpful in the conceptualization of such measurement is provided by the Information Theory Model in which the input is made to correspond with the stimulus card, the filter with the subject to whom the Rorschach technique has been applied, and the output with the response. The problem of this model is to determine the characteristics of the filter (subject) by noting the noises and distortions he produces in his responses. This model too is not yet suitable for experimental testing of the Rorschach hypothesis because of our ignorance of the basic parameters of perception. As a tentative model for the evaluation of the Rorschach technique, the interview technique has been proposed. The application of the content analysis method to Rorschach protocols has indicated that such methods are suitable for eliciting dimensions that reflect personality raings obtained from other sources. By regarding the Rorschach technique as a systematic inter- view behind the veil of ink-blots, we can bridge the gap that now exists between global Rorschach evaluations and other types of personality measures. This approach removed the projective aspects of the Rorschach completely, by eliminating the perceptual factors on which Rorschach based his theory. Until we find ways of determining how perception takes place, we have no choice but to minimize the perceptual approach at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to examine the hypothesis that an intensity dimension of class consciousness exists and plays some significant part in this complex of affective and cognitive dispositions, a survey involving a nationally representative cross section of the adult American public was designed and carried out in March, 1950. Person-to-person interviews were conducted with 1,270 persons wherein they were systematically questioned with regard to class identification, felt strength of belongingness, political alignment, government ownership and control of big industries, the desirability of a working class political party, and the class membership of certain hypothetical persons who were described to them merely in terms of some single belief statement. The resulting data were analyzed with regard to the correlations between felt strength of belonging to a social class and occupational position as well as between felt strength of belonging and each of the aforementioned variables. Significant and positive relations were found to exist in each case, and in general the data may be viewed as a demonstration that an individual's strength of membership feeling in a social class, either in itself or as an index to some more fundamental determinant, is widely involved in his responses to his social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to determine whether there are differences in responses to an attitude-personality questionnaire between a group of students who identified themselves after answering the questionnaire and another group who did not identify themselves. Questions of truthfulness of responses have been raised when persons are required to identify themselves, and questions of bias in sampling have been raised when persons are willing to identify themselves. When those persons who identify themselves also indicate a willingness to be interviewed for the purpose of further study they may represent an even more selective group. Hypotheses have been suggested that those willing to be identified and interviewed may be more self-concerned and anxious, or more sure of themselves, or more exhibitionistic, or more hostile than the general population. If there are personality factors which cause some individuals to identify themselves and be willing to be interviewed while other individuals from the same general population choose to remain anonymous, then any results obtained from the identified or the non-identified group are to that extent considered to be biased.

This article identifies the psychological mechanisms which are active in diagnostic and therapeutic interviews and suggests a few examples of how these mechanisms assert themselves. It has been stated that the purposes of the diagnostic and therapeutic interviews are to discover the conditions underlying certain behavior patterns and to alter these patterns. The first type of interview employs many different techniques: questioning, free association, observation of motor reactions, and responses in more or less standardized situations. The latter type employs techniques of suggestion, direct advice, discussion, giving information, and listening. The diagnostic and therapeutic interviews are used professionally by several types of workers: psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, personnel workers, and psychoanalysts. The broad purposes of the psychiatrist are no different from those of the workers in the other fields. Diagnostic and therapeutic interviews often deal with different phases of the individual but they are all dynamic patterns of personality interactions in which some or all of the same psychological processes occur.

This article focuses on a test on dominance feeling in college women. The Social Personality Inventory here described, emerged as a by-product of a clinical-experimental research with the role of dominance-feeling in the personalities of relatively normal people. It was filled out by as many of these subjects as could be reached, and the scores so obtained were correlated with the ratings for dominance feeling previously given to these subjects at the end of the interview with them. Thus, the present test arose directly from a large store of empirically derived facts and relationships. Each question was derived separately and was given separate preliminary empirical validation and, furthermore, the test as a whole had an external criterion of validity. When this research began, the interview was entirely exploratory. The only considerations that guide the choice of question and that determined lines of investigation were the ideas and facts that had been obtained with infra-human primates. The primary usefulness of the test is, of course, as a research instrument in the various problems of personality. It has, however, demonstrated its usefulness in other directions also. The writer has found it to give illumination and to save a good deal of time in his clinical dealings with students.

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]

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.

Cites a study conducted by the author to assess the effects of interviewer style on patterns of dyadic communication. Interview of four patients by four physicians in the study; Conduct of stimulated recall sessions after each interview; Facilitation of subsequent communication by verbal patterns in the extremely nondirective interviews; Influence of the type of interview on the rate of communication; Impact of the interviewer style on the appearance of pairwise patterning in the interviews; Stability of the interviewer style over time; Need of determining the role of profile stability and pattern analysis in the prediction of the structure of the interview process.

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.

The article presents studies related to hypothetical testing of female like symptoms in the males to indicate the presence of cross-sex identity. Hypothesis testing was based on Spearman's rho calculated for symptomatology scores and the measures. Eleven males from among the Nilotic-speaking Luo of western Kenya were interviewed. All reported one or more symptoms. For measures expected to yield female-like responses: symptomatology was unassociated with reported level of child care; symptomatology was associated with feminine role choice . For measures expected to elicit protest masculinity: symptomatology was associated with drinking, but not with fighting, wife beating, or bravery ; symptomatology was associated with semantic differential description of self as strong. Twenty-six males and their wives from among the Bantu-speaking Gusii of western Kenya were interviewed. 21 males experienced symptoms according to the reports of either the husband or the wife, or both. Only two sex-identity measures were administered. For role choice, expected to yield female-like responses, preference for the mother role was unassociated with level of symptomatology. These studies bring to seven the number of societies for which male symptomatology has been shown to be related to one or more measures of sex identity.