Full Description
0 e The contributors to this book review our current knowledge of context effects in survey research, psychological testing, and social judgement. Drawing on recent developments in cognitive psychology, they offer theoretical accounts of the conditions that lead to the emergence of various context effects and report a number of new experimental studies. At stake now are clear, practical needs in the structuring of reliable tests, and a strong interest to develop a coherent theoretical framework to assess and scrutinize context effects, in addition to the desire to align some of the findings in survey research studies with the discoveries made in the information-processing field. This book attests to a fruitful dialogue between cognitive psychologists and survey researchers, as the cognitive processes initiated by question probes are really beginning to be understood and context effects classified and differentiated.
Contents
I. Introduction and Historical Overview.- 1 Introduction.- 2 Context Effects: State of the Past/State of the Art.- II. Question-Order Effects in Surveys.- 3 "Order Effects" in Survey Research: Activation and Information Functions of Preceding Questions.- 4 Context Effects on Responses to Attitude Questions: Attitudes as Memory Structures.- 5 Constructive Processes as a Source of Context Effects in Survey Research: Explorations in Self-Generated Validity.- 6 Question-Order Effects and Brand Evaluations: The Moderating Role of Consumer Knowledge.- 7 Basking and Brooding: The Motivating Effects of Filter Questions in Surveys.- 8 Serial Context Effects in Survey Interviews.- 9 Questionnaire Context as a Source of Response Differences in Mail and Telephone Surveys.- 10 Context Effects as Substantive Data in Social Surveys.- 11 Qualitative Analysis of Question-Order and Context Effects: The Use of Think-Aloud Responses.- 12 Thoughts on the Nature of Context Effects.- III. Response-Order Effects in Surveys.- 13 A Cognitive Model of Response-Order Effects in Survey Measurement.- 14 The Impact of Cognitive Sophistication and Attitude Importance on Response-Order and Question-Order Effects.- IV. Order Effects in Psychological Testing.- 15 Order Effects within Personality Measures.- 16 Context Influences on the Meaning of Work.- 17 The Psychometrics of Order Effects.- V. Social Judgment.- 18 Information-Processing Functions of Generic Knowledge Structures and Their Role in Context Effects in Social Judgment.- 19 Context Effects and the Communicative Functions of Quantifiers: Implications for Their Use in Attitude Research.- 20 Cognitive Representation of Bipolar Survey Items.- VI. Summary.- 21 What Have We Learned?.- References.
