Sundström Aksel, Stockemer Daniel
Aksel Sundström is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Daniel Stockemer is Konrad Adenauer Research Chair in Empirical Democracy Studies and professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada.
Public Opin Q. 2022 Sep 2;86(3):668-696. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfac031. eCollection 2022 Fall.
Public opinion surveys are a fundamental tool to measure support for women's political rights. This article focuses on perceptions of women's suitability for leadership. To what extent do influential cross-country surveys that include such items suffer from measurement errors stemming from gender of interviewer effects? Building on the literature on social desirability, we expect that respondents are more likely to express preference for men's suitability as political leaders with male interviewers and more likely to state support for women's leadership when interviewed by a woman. We hypothesize that these processes are conditioned by having one's spouse present, by age differences between respondents and interviewers, as well as by respondents' levels of education. Analyzing Afrobarometer data, we generally find support for our claims. In addition, it seems that men are slightly more affected by such effects than women are. These gender of interviewer effects persist when analyzing alternative survey rounds and are insensitive to various fixed effects specifications and robustness tests. For the analysis of survey data, we suggest that researchers using gender-related items should control for gender of interviewer effects. We propose that comparative survey programs pay even more attention to interviewer characteristics and the interview situation in their protocols.
民意调查是衡量对妇女政治权利支持程度的一项基本工具。本文聚焦于对女性领导能力的看法。那些包含此类问题的有影响力的跨国调查在多大程度上会受到因采访者性别效应而产生的测量误差的影响？基于有关社会期望的文献，我们预计，受访者在接受男性采访时更有可能表达出对男性作为政治领导人的偏好，而在接受女性采访时更有可能表示支持女性领导。我们假设，这些过程会受到受访者配偶是否在场、受访者与采访者之间的年龄差异以及受访者的教育程度的影响。通过分析非洲晴雨表数据，我们总体上支持我们的观点。此外，似乎男性比女性受此类效应的影响略大。在分析不同轮次的调查时，这些采访者性别效应依然存在，并且对各种固定效应设定和稳健性检验不敏感。对于调查数据分析，我们建议使用与性别相关问题的研究人员应控制采访者性别效应。我们提议，比较调查项目在其方案中应更加关注采访者特征和采访情境。
