Wpływ płci ankietera na wyniki uzyskiwane w badaniach

Abstract

The author formulates the following hypotheses: 1° a – Men, as compared with women, obtain an image of respondents characterized by a higher degree and a greater number of traits favourably evaluated, in a given society or group; 2° – they obtain more often opinions that are official or conforming in relation to the social milieu, whereas women obtain oftener those which are freer, more private and individualized; 3° – there is a tendency, on the part of respondents, to present a better self image to interviewers of the opposite sex; 4° – the more unequivocal; and less suggestive is the wording of questions in the interview schedule the smaller are the differences in results obtained, respectively, by men and women; 5° – women obtain quantitatively more information in open-ended questions. A secondary statistical analysis of 1200 interviews from a big city and 1004 ones from a small town was made. (The interviewers in the original research were sociology students.) With the help of the χ2 test two distributions of answers were compared: the one found among respondents interviewed by men and the other among those interviewed by women. In addition, the same comparisons were made for sub-groups in which sex, occupation and age were held constant. The questions referred to such topics as consumption of cultural goods, evaluation of the respondent’s own living standard and of that of his family, job satisfaction, declared religiosity, and municipal problems. From the analysis it was found that men, as compared with women, obtain in interviews: 1° – a smaller number of declarations of book reading in the big city and to the contrary in the small town; 2° – more favourable evaluations of changes that had taken place in the urban milieu (this effect appeared only among male respondents); 3° – more optimistic ex¬pectations with regard to the future improvement in the living standard; 4° – more answers expressing job satisfaction (among female respondents only); 5° – less declarations of an extreme atheism and, at the same time, more those expressing an extreme religious attitude (this effect showing up among male respondents only); 6° – smaller quantity of information in the answers to open-ended questions requiring a certain amount of intellectual effort on the part of respondents, and referring to municipal problems in the big city. The sharpest differences were those which appeared in the answers concerning job satisfaction of women (18 percentage points) and expressing an extreme atheistic attitude (10 percentage points). The differences found seem to corroborate only the hypotheses 1, 4 and 5. Explaining the differences in the answers that expressed an atheistic attitude, the author formulated a complementary hypothesis concerning the sexual motivation combined with the influence of cultural patterns that regulate the relations between the two sexes in a society.