Response Bias

Sources of Response Bias

For several decades, psychologists, sociologists, and survey researchers have worked to understand the cognitive and communicative processes that generate survey responses. A central insight is that answering a survey question is a complicated process consisting of several distinct tasks (even though these tasks are not completely sequential or independent processes). Biased responses may [Page 1272]arise at any of these stages. It is important to note that there is no single process that would be responsible for response bias. Potential sources of biased responses can be illustrated with a conceptual model of the survey response process that distinguishes four stages.

• First, the respondent needs to comprehend the question: He or she needs to understand what information is sought. Poor wording may easily lead to systematic misunderstanding of the question and thus to biased responses.
• Second, the respondent must retrieve the relevant information from his or her memory. This stage activates retrieval strategies that often require filling in missing details. The success of these retrieval strategies depends on many variables, such as the respondent's cognitive ability and memory capacity.
• The third stage involves making a judgment: Is the information just retrieved from memory complete? If not, the respondent uses estimation strategies that integrate the retrieved information with other salient information that is contained in the survey questionnaire, provided by the interviewer, and so on. These estimation strategies often involve a notion of satisficing, that is, the respondent uses just as much time and effort as is needed to construct a response that is “good enough.” Estimation strategies and the corresponding heuristics typically result in biased responses rather than random errors.
• The final stage is to report the response that has been constructed in the first three stages. The respondent may alter his or her response because he or she does not want to reveal the constructed response for reasons of confidentiality or social desirability.

Examples