APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 21: 277287 (2007)

Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1340

Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology

NORBERT SCHWARZ*
Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

SUMMARY
Since its initiation in the early 1980s, research into cognitive aspects of survey methods (CASM) has
made considerable progress in illuminating the cognitive and communicative processes underlying
survey responding. This article reviews key themes and developments, notes strengths and shortcomings and places the contributions to this special issue in this context. Copyright # 2007 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In the early 1980s, psychologists and survey methodologists deliberately attempted to

create a new interdisciplinary field, which became known as CASMCognitive Aspects of
Survey Methodology. The enterprise was jump-started by two conferences, one held in the
United States in 1983 under the auspices of the National Research Council (Jabine, Straf,
Tanur, & Tourangeau, 1984) and one held in Germany in 1984, under the auspices of
ZUMA (Hippler, Schwarz, & Sudman, 1987). In the two decades since, work on cognitive
aspects of survey measurement has developed at a rapid pace, resulting in a flurry of
conferences, edited volumes and special issues of journals (Jobe & Loftus, 1991;
Lyberg et al., 1997; Presser et al., 2004; Schwarz, Park, Knauper, & Sudman, 1998;
Schwarz & Sudman, 1992, 1994, 1996; Sirken et al., 1999; Tanur, 1992) as well as
three comprehensive monographs (Krosnick & Fabrigar, in press; Tourangeau, Rips, &
Rasinski, 2000; Sudman, Bradburn, & Schwarz, 1996). Moreover, major survey centres
established cognitive laboratories to help with questionnaire development and courses in
cognitive psychology have entered the curricula of graduate programs in survey
methodology.
Drawing on psychological theories of language comprehension, memory and judgment,
CASM researchers formulated models of the question answering process and tested them in
laboratory experiments and experimental surveys. As the contributions to this special issue
illustrate, work in this field has the potential to contribute to our understanding of basic
psychological processes as well as to the improvement of survey methodology. This article
summarises key themes of CASM research and places the contributions in this context.
THE TASKS INVOLVED IN ANSWERING SURVEY QUESTIONS
CASM researchers share wide agreement that answering a survey question poses several
interrelated tasks (Cannell, Marquis, & Laurent, 1977; Strack & Martin, 1987; Tourangeau,
*Correspondence to: Norbert Schwarz, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
48106-1248, USA. E-mail: nschwarz@umich.edu

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1984). Respondents first need to interpret the question to understand what is meant and to
determine which information they ought to provide. If the question is an attitude question,
they may either retrieve a previously formed attitude judgment from memory, or they may
form a judgment on the spot, based on whatever relevant information is accessible at that
point in time. While survey researchers have typically hoped for the former, the latter is far
more likely, consistent with current research into attitude construction in social psychology
(Schwarz, in press; Smith & Conrey, 2007). If the question is a behavioural question,
respondents need to identify the behaviour of interest and recall relevant information.
Survey researchers have typically hoped that respondents do so by reviewing the reference
period specified in the question (such as last week or last month) to identify relevant
instances that can be counted. Unless the behaviour is rare and important, such
an enumeration strategy is rarely used; instead, respondents resort to a variety of estimation
and inference strategies (Menon, 1994). Once a private judgment is formed in respondents
minds, they have to communicate it to the researcher. To do so, they may need to format their
judgment to fit the response alternatives provided as part of the question. Moreover,
respondents may wish to edit their response before they communicate it, due to influences of
social desirability and situational adequacy. Performance of each of these tasks is highly
context dependent and often profoundly shaped by the research instrument. The resulting
contextual influences are usually referred to as response effects in the survey literature.
As Ongena and Dijkstra (2007, this issue) note, this widely shared conceptualisation of
the components of the survey response process is exclusively respondent-focused, as is the
bulk of CASM research. Yet the prototypical survey interview, conducted in person or on
the phone, involves the collaboration of an interviewer and a respondent and is presumably
as much affected by the interviewers as by the respondents performance. Historically,
analyses of interviewer behaviour and its influence on survey data were a key feature of
survey methods research (for a review see Cannell & Kahn, 1968), with an emphasis on the
interpersonal aspects of survey interviews. This approach lost much of its popularity when
comprehensive meta-analyses of response effects, conducted in the early 1970s, indicated
that the influence of task characteristics dwarfed the influence of interviewer and
respondent characteristics (Sudman & Bradburn, 1974). In response to this observation,
survey methodologists turned increasingly to the investigation of the tasks presented by a
survey question. This emphasis provided a natural point of contact for cognitive
psychologists and dominates CASM research, as the contributions to this issue illustrate.
In parallel, qualitative studies in the traditions of ethnography and discourse analysis
illuminated complications that arise in survey interviews (Gerber, 1999; Maynard,
Houtkoop-Steenstra, Schaeffer, & Van der Zouwen, 2002; Suchman & Jordan, 1990),
although many researchers found it difficult to derive general principles from the rich and
compelling case studies presented. Ongena and Dijkstra (2007, this issue) connect these
respondent-focused and interaction-focused research traditions and outline a model that
links the tasks faced by interviewers and respondents. The emerging issues present a
promising topic for experimental psychologists interested in collaborative cognition
(Baltes & Staudinger, 1996).

MAKING SENSE OF QUESTIONS: COGNITION AND COMMUNICATION

CASMs focus on task characteristics and respondent behaviour is apparent even where the
research addresses the interplay of cognitive and communicative processes in question
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comprehension and judgment. Not surprisingly, survey researchers have always worried if
respondents understand their questions as intended (for early discussions see Belson, 1968,
1981; Cantril, 1944; Payne, 1951). Accordingly, they devised numerous guidelines for
good survey questions, emphasising the need to avoid complicated wordings and
unfamiliar terms (Bradburn, Sudman, & Warnsink, 2004). Although this advice is sound, it
misses that question comprehension involves more than an understanding of the literal
meaning of the utterance. When asked, What have you done today? respondents will
certainly understand the wordsyet they may nevertheless not know on which behaviours
they are to report. Should they report that they took a shower, for example or is the
researcher not interested in this information? To provide a meaningful answer, respondents
need to infer the questioners intentions, that is the pragmatic meaning of the question. To
do so, they rely on the tacit assumptions that govern the conduct of conversations in daily
life (Grice, 1975) and draw on the context of the utterance to infer the intended meaning.
In surveys and laboratory experiments, the researchers contributions to the conversation
are not limited to explicit instructions and the questions asked. Instead, they include
apparently formal aspects of questionnaire design, from the choice of response
alternatives to the formal characteristics of scales and the graphical lay-out of
questionnaires. Numerous studies showed that respondents draw on such characteristics
to infer the pragmatic meaning of questions in ways that can be conceptualised in terms of
Grices (1975) logic of conversation (for reviews see Clark & Schober, 1992; Schwarz,
1996). Even the researchers affiliation, gleaned from the letterhead, or the title of a survey
can affect how respondents interpret the questions asked, as Galesic and Tourangeau (this
volume) illustrate. In their study, respondents answered identical questions about work
place behaviour presented as part of a Sexual Harassment Survey conducted for Women
Against Sexual Harassment or as part of a Work Atmosphere Survey conducted for a
Work Environment Institute. As expected, respondents perceived the same behaviours as
more likely to represent sexual harassment when they were presented as part of a sexual
harassment survey rather than a work atmosphere surveyafter all, why else would they
have been included? Moreover, once labelled as sexual harassment, they rated these
behaviours as more bothersome and reported that they experienced them with a higher
frequency. These findings highlight how contextual variables influence the pragmatic
interpretation of questions, with downstream effects on frequency estimates. Processes of
this type presumably underlie the observation that different surveys arrive at markedly
different prevalence estimates, as Galesic and Tourangeau (2007, this issue) note in their
review.
Deliberate reliance on contextual information is particularly likely when respondents
have no opportunity to ask for clarification or to ground their understanding in an
unconstrained exchange with the interviewer (Schober, 1999). This is the case under the
self-administered conditions of mail and web surveys, where nobody is available
to be asked, or when a well-trained interviewer responds, Whatever it means to you.
From a conversational perspective, such whatever-it-means-to-you responses are
nonsensicalafter all, it is the questioner who has to decide what he or she wants to
know. Nevertheless, they are a standard feature of interviewer training in survey research,
where an assumed need for question standardisation trumps other concerns (Fowler &
Mangione, 1990). But as Suchman and Jordan (1990) noted, what needs to be standardised
is question meaning, not question wording per se. This is particularly apparent when the
question pertains to factual matters, where respondents understanding of what, for
example counts as furniture may differ from the wisdom of the government agency that
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defined this category of household purchases. In an influential series of studies, Conrad and
Schober (for a review see Schober & Conrad, 2002) provided compelling evidence that a
liberalisation of the standardisation requirement improves data quality under these
conditions, although the same may not apply to attitude questions (see Sudman et al., 1996,
for a discussion). In the present issue, they extend this work from personal interviews to
web surveys and observe that respondents answer more accurately when they can request
clarifications or when clarifications are automatically provided by the program if
respondents take a long time to answer (Conrad, Schober, & Coiner, 2007, this issue).
These design features avoid burdening the questionnaire with numerous definitions for
respondents who may not need them. The tricky question, of course, is how to determine
when a respondent is likely to need clarifications. At present, we know little about how
respondents decide that they do so, nor about how interviewers decide to offer clarifications
when their instructions permit it (see Ongena & Dijkstra, 2007, this issue). Metacognitive
experiences of processing difficulty are likely to play an important role in respondents
decision, but have so far not received attention in CASM research. A systematic
exploration of these issues will fill an important gap in the discussion of standardised
interviewing.
To identify question comprehension problems at the pretesting stage, CASM researchers
developed a rich arsenal of methods that are routinely applied in cognitive laboratories at
survey research centres and statistical agencies (for reviews see the contributions in
Schwarz & Sudman, 1996). Most widely used are cognitive interviews that combine
elements of concurrent or retrospective think-aloud procedures with paraphrasing tasks
(DeMaio & Rothgeb, 1996), as well as detailed analyses of interviews conducted under
field conditions (Fowler & Cannell, 1996). From the perspective of survey practitioners,
the development of improved pretesting procedures is often considered the most important
and fruitful contribution of CASM research, although the contributions of this work to
basic theorising have so far been limited.

REPORTING ON ONES ATTITUDES: EVALUATIVE

JUDGMENT IN CONTEXT
Most psychologists and social scientists conceptualise attitudes as enduring dispositions
that are expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or
disfavour (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, p. 1). From this perspective, contextual influences on
respondents attitude reports are a source of undesirable noise that clouds respondents
true attitudes. An alternative approach treats attitudes as evaluative judgments that are
formed on the spot, based on whatever information is accessible at that point in time (for
variants of this approach see Lord & Lepper, 1999; Schwarz, in press; Schwarz & Bohner,
2001; Tourangeau, 1992). From this perspective, cognition stands in the service of action
and only context-sensitive evaluation can guide behaviour in adaptive ways. Hence, any
adaptive system of evaluation should be informed by past experience, but highly sensitive
to the specifics of the present; it should overweigh recent experience at the expense of more
distant experience, and experience from similar situations at the expense of experience
from dissimilar situations; and it should take current goals and concerns into account to
ensure that the assessment is relevant to what we attempt to do now (Schwarz, in press).
Accordingly, contextual influences on attitude judgments are not an artifact but part and
parcel of the phenomenon of interest. These diverging perspectives are the topic of current
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theoretical and methodological controversies in social psychology (see the contributions in

Gawronski, in press); their development was, in part, stimulated by survey researchers
observation that attitude reports are highly context dependent (for reviews see Schuman &
Presser, 1981; Tourangeau & Rasinski, 1988).
Since the early days of opinion polls (Cantril, 1944; Payne, 1951), survey researchers
observed that minor variations in question wording, format and order can profoundly affect
the obtained answers. By the early 1980s, they had amassed a solid body of reliably
replicable findings, summarised in Schuman and Pressers (1981) influential Questions and
Answers in Attitude Surveys, which set the stage for a collaboration with cognitive social
psychologists, who had just turned to the information processing paradigm as a conceptual
framework (Wyer & Carlston, 1979). Two decades later, the underlying processes are
increasingly well understood and conceptualised in comprehensive models that predict the
emergence, direction and size of context effects in attitude reports, as well as their
generalisation across related items (Schwarz & Bless, 1992, in press; Sudman et al., 1996;
Tourangeau, 1999).
In the present issue, Chessa and Holleman apply cognitive modelling to one of the
classic question wording effects in the survey literature, using a methodology that is
under-represented in CASM research. Five decades ago, Rugg (1941) observed that
Americans were more likely to support freedom of speech when the question asked
whether speeches against democracy should be forbidden (yes/no) than when it asked
whether they should be allowed (yes/no). This frequently replicated finding became
known as the forbid-allow asymmetry and most authors focused on a comparison of
forbidding vs. not allowing. However, the overall pattern extends beyond this contrast
and respondents are more likely to answer No to either question form. Later research
showed that this response pattern is driven by indifferent respondents (Hippler & Schwarz,
1986). Those who strongly favour the issue respond consistently to both question forms,
answering Yes to the allow version and No to the forbid version; conversely, those who
strongly oppose the issue answer Yes to the forbid version and No to the allow version.
No asymmetry is observed for these respondents. Indifferent respondents, however, answer
No to either question because they neither want to encourage the behaviour by allowing
it, nor to discourage the behaviour by forbidding it; if given a choice, they would prefer a
do not-do-anything-about-it response. As a result, both question forms receive more No
than Yes responses: In the allow version, the No category includes those opposed to
the issue plus indifferent respondents; in the forbid version it includes those in favour of
the issue plus indifferent respondents. Accordingly, the percentage of indifferent
respondents determines the size of the forbid-allow asymmetry for a given topic, often
resulting in large differences in the effects obtained across items (as illustrated in Chessa
and Hollemans Table 1). Chessa and Hollemans (2007, this issue) analysis of response
latencies suggests that the asymmetry emerges at the response stage, when respondents
need to map their opinion onto the restricted Yes or No options. Theoretically, this
should be particularly difficult for indifferent respondents, whose position does not easily
fit these response alternatives (Hippler & Schwarz, 1986). Unfortunately, the available data
preclude an analysis of this possibility because respondents attitude position has not been
assessed. Future research may fruitfully explore whether the observed differences in
response time at the question answering stage hold for all respondents, as Chessa and
Hollemans focus on the connotations of the terms forbid and allow suggests, or whether
they are driven by indifferent respondents, who face difficulties at the response formatting
stage.
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REPORTING ON ONES BEHAVIOUR: MEMORY AND ESTIMATION

Much of what we know about human behaviour and the state of societyfrom dietary habits
to the utilisation of health care services, the dynamics of poverty and the nations
unemployment rateis based on self-reports collected in representative sample surveys. The
accuracy of these reports has long been a topic of concern (for an early example see Cannell,
Fisher, & Bakker, 1965) and even major life-events, like overnight hospitalisations (Cannell
et al., 1965) or spells of unemployment (Mathiowetz & Duncan, 1988) are frequently
under-reported. Hence, numerous record check studies identified a great deal of error, as
Wentland and Smith (1993, p. 99) concluded in a comprehensive review. Historically, survey
researchers attempts to identify sources and patterns of error have been hampered by a lack of
comprehensive process models and overly simplistic assumptions about memory. CASM
research had a profound impact in this domain and survey data collection is increasingly
informed by current theorising about autobiographical memory, which highlights how the
hierarchically nested structure of autobiographical memory can facilitate or impair recall (for
reviews see Belli, 1998; Shum & Rips, 1999).
Drawing on these models, Belli (1998) developed a method designed by demographers
to assess respondents life histories (Freedman, Thornton, Camburn, Alwin, & YoungDeMarco, 1988) into a general procedure for collecting autobiographical information,
dubbed the Event History Calendar. By crossing the behaviours of interest with a time-line,
the method presents a complex grid that allows respondents to place various behaviours
and events in time and space, taking advantage of the observation that recalling information
in one domain may bring to mind temporally or thematically related information in other
domains. In this issue, van der Vaart and Glasners (2007, this issue) use of timelines in
telephone surveys illustrates this approach.
Considerable progress has also been made in the assessment of behavioural frequency
reports. Survey researchers have long assumed that most frequency reports are based on a
recall-and-count strategy and that errors are either due to forgetting or to the misdating of
events. These assumptions were challenged by the observation that respondents frequently
rely on estimation strategies (e.g. Blair & Burton, 1987), making systematic use of features
of the questionnaire, like the numeric values of frequency scales, to arrive at a plausible
estimate (e.g. Schwarz, Hippler, Deutsch, & Strack, 1985). As a result, frequency reports
are highly context dependent, often shaped by the research instrument. Later research (e.g.,
Brown, 2002; Menon, 1994) integrated these observations in multi-strategy models of
frequency estimation and identified the conditions that give rise to different strategies.
Browns (2002) multiple-strategy approach assumes that strategy selection is a function of
the format in which relevant information is represented in memory, which in turn depends
on characteristics of the respective behaviour. Brown and colleagues (2007, this issue)
illustrate this approach with an analysis of the mnemonic consequences of activities and
emotions and their impact on retrieval strategies. The observed accuracy of emotion reports
is impressive, although other findings (for a review see Robinson & Clore, 2002) suggest
that it is partly a function of the coarse reporting level used, which is limited to whether the
respondent experienced the emotion at all during a given day. Brown and colleagues
(2007, this issue) coarse reporting level also attenuates a frequently overlooked problem
that can thwart comparisons pertaining to reference periods of differential length (like a
day vs. a week in their study). When respondents are asked, for example how often they
have been angry, they need to determine if the researchers interest includes minor
irritations or only episodes of major anger. When the question pertains to today, they infer
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that minor irritations are part of what they are to report on, given that major annoyances are
unlikely to occur on a daily basis. When asked how often they have been angry last week,
however, they infer that the researcher is interested in more serious instances of
angerafter all, they can hardly be expected to remember all the minor irritations of the
week. This shift in the inferred pragmatic meaning of the question results in higher
frequency reports for short than for long reference periods, reflecting the differential actual
frequency of minor versus major episodes of anger (Winkielman, Knauper, & Schwarz,
1998). Accordingly, mismatches between reports pertaining to reference periods of
differential length are not exclusively due to memory processes and it is often difficult to
disentangle the effects of question interpretation and forgetting.
When behavioural reports are conceptualised in the overall framework of the question
answering process, it becomes apparent that memory processes are only one of the
determinants of their accuracy. As already noted, respondents may report on a behaviour
that does not match what the researcher had in mind (e.g. Schober & Conrad, 2002) and
contextual variables may influence question interpretation with downstream effects on
frequency reports (Galesic & Tourangeau, 2007, this issue; Winkielman et al., 1998).
Moreover, respondents may hesitate to report that they do engage in undesirable
behaviours or fail to engage in desirable ones. The extent to which such socially desirable
responding (for a review see DeMaio, 1984) reflects deliberate misreporting or a
self-serving reconstruction of what one must have done is the topic of some controversy
and it is often difficult to determine whether respondents lie, manage to see themselves in a
positive light or merely rely on cultural norms and generic self-knowledge in
reconstructing their past behaviour (Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1999; Ross, 1989). Stocke
and Starks (2007, this issue) analysis of reported voting behaviour bears on this ambiguity.
Consistent with previous studies, they observe that respondents over-report voting
behaviour and the more so, the more time has elapsed since election day. More important,
the influence of temporal distance is more pronounced for respondents with high political
involvement. Stocke and Stark suggest that these respondents hold stronger political
participation norms and hence are subject to stronger social desirability bias. This bias is
assumed to exert its strongest influence under conditions of poor memory for ones actual
behaviour, consistent with the observation that self-serving reconstructions are most likely
under conditions of ambiguity (Kunda, 1999). If respondents solely cared about their
self-presentation in the interview, they would presumably also over-report when they are
aware of their absence from the ballot box. While motivational interpretations of such
findings are plausible, it is difficult to rule out a purely cognitive account. Being unable to
recall with any certainty whether they voted in the last election or not, respondents may
draw on their usual behaviour to infer what they must have done (Ross, 1989. Those with
higher political involvement presumably participate in elections more regularly and hence
are also more likely to infer that they must have done so in the last election.
A TWO-WAY BRIDGE?
The initiators of the first CASM conferences hoped to build a two-way bridge between
cognitive psychology and survey methods to facilitate an exchange that would advance
basic research and improve survey practice. In the two decades since these conferences,
this bridge has seen considerable traffic. However, much of this traffic has been from
psychology to survey methods. This is not surprising. Survey research offers a method, not
a substantive body of theorising about human cognition and behaviour. Hence, the contact
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with survey researchers influenced cognitive theorising mostly by exposing psychologists

to new tasks and phenomena, like context effects in attitude measurement and systematic
error patterns in reports of everyday behaviours, not by contributing novel theoretical
perspectives. One might have hoped, however, that the large amount of questionnaire
pretesting done in the cognitive laboratories of major survey research centres and statistical
agencies would contribute to a cumulative body of knowledge about principles of
questionnaire design. To date, this has not been the case. As OMuircheartaigh (1999), p.
51) noted, The function of the cognitive laboratory (. . .) is not primarily the development
of principles of question or questionnaire design. Rather, it is to provide a facility for
pretesting questionnaires for use in ongoing surveys. It is evaluated not by its contributions
to general principles or knowledge, but by its throughput of questionnaires in a documented
and timely manner. Unfortunately, this produces considerable redundancy and many
missed opportunities for general insights.
Nevertheless, survey research provides many opportunities for broadening the agenda of
cognitive research beyond the analysis of respondents and interviewers tasks. To date,
cognitive psychologists have rarely taken advantage of the unique opportunities that
representative sample surveys afford. Working within the paradigm of general information
processing models, they have mostly focused on inside-the-head phenomena, trusting
that any mind works pretty much like any other mindan assumption that makes the use of
representative samples an unnecessary luxury, in particular, when this luxury comes at the
cost of limited experimental control. But much as psychologys shift from behaviourism to
information processing has made psychologists interesting partners for survey
methodological work, psychologists growing interest in the socially and culturally
situated nature of cognition may eventually make survey researchers interesting partners
for basic psychological work. For example representative samples provide a prime avenue
for studying the influence of social location on peoples construction of the world in which
they live (e.g. Hardin & Higgins, 1996), for exploring how historical contexts shape
autobiographical memory and the reconstruction of history (e.g. Schuman, Rieger, &
Gaidys, 1994) or for assessing how beliefs spread in a population (e.g. Nowack, Szamrej, &
Latane, 1990). Moreover, cross-national surveys provide promising opportunities for
testing theories of cultural differences in cognition, communication and autobiographical
memory, issues that bear on basic psychological theorising as well as the culture-sensitivity
of context effects in surveys (e.g. Schwarz, 2003). Hopefully, future decades will see more
two-way traffic on CASMs bridge.
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