ABSTRACT
Self-reports of behaviors and attitudes are the dominant source of data in the social sciences. From the dynamics of attitude change to consumer behavior or health problems, and from the styles of parenting to the nation’s unemployment rate or the prevalence of crime, psychologists and social scientists rely on respondents’ self-reports as their major database for testing theories of human behavior and offering advice on public policy. Unfortunately, self-reports are a fallible source of data, and minor variations in question wording or question order can strongly affect the obtained answers and hence the conclusions drawn about the phenomenon under study. It is therefore important to understand how respondents arrive at answers to the questions we pose in selfadministered questionnaires, survey interviews, and the psychological laboratory. Since the early 1980s, psychologists and survey methodologists have addressed the cognitive and communicative processes underlying self-reports in an interdisciplinary program of experimental research. Drawing on psychological theories of language comprehension, memory, judgment, and communication, this work has identified numerous sources of context effects in self-reports and has provided conceptual frameworks that promise to improve data-collec tion strategies (see Sudman, Bradburn, & Schwarz, 1996, for a review).
