By Tom Miller, President & CEO

We were intrigued by Allison Kopicki’s article, Women and the ‘I Don’t Know’ Problem, in the New York Times on May 15, 2014.

In it she notes that pollsters have found consistently that women more often than men choose “don’t know” when asked for opinions on current topics about which most should be familiar. Ms. Kopicki’s article motivated us to examine our own findings based on the gender of the respondent to our self-administered questionnaires (read or written and not administered by telephone interviewers). Our comparison of responses by men and women provided from self-administered surveys do not support those reported by Ms. Kopicki; the completion of a survey without an interviewer changes the dynamics and the outcomes significantly.

Ms. Kopicki quotes professor Jon Krosnick of Stanford as concluding that “pollsters are communicating to … respondents that they need to have a level of certainty for having an opinion” and that respondents choose “don’t know” because they are “'satisficing,' or picking the answer that makes it easiest to reduce the burden of answering the question.” Thus, for women, the offering of “don’t know” in lieu of an opinion could be attributable to their having a higher threshold for certainty than men or a greater desire to get off the phone and return to the task at hand.

Research on social desirability demonstrates that women are more likely than men to succumb to group pressures when they are observed (see Eagly and Carli) and are more likely to conform when the topic is less known to them (e.g., sports versus fashion; see Sistrunk and McDavid). From this perspective, perhaps women reported “don’t Know” more often than men, not because women failed to give the interviewers what they expected, but because women gave an answer that was least likely to be judged incorrect if the interviewers had a hidden preference for one opinion or the other.

Nevertheless, the demand characteristics of a telephone interview distort responses and these distortions are well established in our survey experiments and those of others. Research is clear that telephone interview interactions result in responses to evaluative questions (e.g. how do you rate the quality of your police department, library, street repair) that are much more positive than are responses to the same question when asked on a self-administered questionnaire (Dillman, p. 229). These results are hypothesized to be due to the respondent’s acquiescence to a request for civility or approval implied simply by the existence of the interviewer and is true of both men and women.

When men and women have time and privacy, as they do for a self-administered questionnaire, they tend to show their uncertainty in equal proportions. The privacy and time to contemplate in a mailed survey are two of many reasons that mailed surveys are in ascendance.

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.