Social Distance and Interviewer Effects

Dohrenwend, Bruce P.; Colombotos, John

doi:10.1086/267624

Cited by 68 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Most of the interviewers in the SPAN project just graduated or were still in college. Conform findings in the literature that both too much and too little respondentinterviewer social distance will produce biasing effects (Dohrenwend et al 1968; for an overview see Nederhof 1985) we believe this age gap minimizes the tendency of respondents to provide social desirable answers.…”

Section: What Does the Methods Entail?supporting

confidence: 51%

The space-time budget method in criminological research

et al. 2014

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This article reviews the Space-Time Budget method developed by Wikström and colleagues and particularly discusses its relevance for criminological research. The Space-Time Budget method is a data collection instrument aimed at recording, retrospectively, on an hour-by-hour basis, the whereabouts and activities of respondents during four days in the week before the interview. The method includes items about criminologically relevant events, such as offending and victimization. We demonstrate that the method can be very useful in criminology, because it enables the study of situational causes of crime and victimization, because it enables detailed measurement of theoretical concepts such as individual lifestyles and individual routine activities, and because it enables the study of adolescents' whereabouts, which extends the traditional focus on residential neighborhoods. The present article provides the historical background of the method, explains how the method can be applied, presents validation results based on data from 843 secondary school students in the Netherlands and describes the methods' strengths and weaknesses. Two case studies are summarized to illustrate the usefulness of the method in criminological research. The article concludes with some anticipated future developments and recommendations on further readings. To enable cross-national comparison of time use, Szalai and colleagues developed methods for sampling, interviewing, coding and data processing that were implemented in all twelve participating countries. These methods and instruments shaped most of the subsequent time use studies (Harvey and Pentland 1999: 6; Michelson 2005: 12).Time use studies have now appeared on a variety of topics and in a variety of fields. Recent overviews mention time use studies within economics, business administration, gerontology, urban planning, political science and occupational therapy, nursing and medicine, recreation and physical and health education, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Just to give a few examples: in economics, time use data is applied for investigating poverty (e.g., whether individuals have too many obligations to enjoy leisure) or the time spent on paid work relative to 'nonmarket-productive' time such as time spent on domestic activity, education or child care. Health studies and studies in gerontology apply time use data to investigate active and sedentary behavior and time use by older

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Section: What Does the Methods Entail?supporting

confidence: 51%

The space-time budget method in criminological research

et al. 2014

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“…A simpler, albeit less effective method is to warn subjects that the test instrument contains methods for detecting faking. Additionally, the interviewer selected can strongly affect the amount of SD bias evoked, because results of an interview are more likely to be biased when subjects and interviewers are similar with respect to social distance (e.g., Dohrenwend, Colombotos, & Dohrenwend, 1968). These are but a few of the many available methods for reducing elicitation of socially desirable responding; a more complete review of demand-reduction techniques is presented by Paulhus (1991).…”

Section: Methods Of Controlling Sdbmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social desirability bias: A neglected aspect of validity testing

King¹,

Bruner²

2000

Psychol. Mark.

797

461

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The past decade has witnessed a tremendous growth in the use of multi-item scales in consumer-related research. Concurrently, there is increasing concern about the quality of these measures. While the majority of articles now discuss the reliability of the scales administered, fewer address the issue of scale validity. One neglected scale validity issue which should be of particular concern in consumer behavior research is potential social desirability bias associated with scale measures. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the nature of such a bias, the means for testing for it, and ways it can and should be implemented in consumer-related research.

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“…The interviewers have also worked for several years as interviewers for HKCIC in the Guangdong province. While interviewer effects stemming from the personal characteristics of the interviewers can be expected to be low, thanks to their nationality, educational background, professional background, gender, and social class (Dohrenwend et al, 1968;Campbell, 1981;Davis, 1997;Kim, 1997), there are potentially other interviewer effects stemming from the use of non-academic interviewers with a clear political agenda, effects that might lower the credibility of the empirical data (cf. Pegg and Wilson, 2003).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%