Who's Asking? Answers May Depend On It
Last November we conducted a survey of British Asians on their attitudes to the military strikes in Afghanistan and to the War against Terrorism for Eastern Eye, a weekly newspaper aimed at Britain's Asian community. Over a third of the interviews were conducted by Asian interviewers. Therefore, in an interesting spin-off to the research we decided to look at whether or not the ethnicity of the interview made a difference on the answers given i.e. was there an interviewer effect? A number of studies in the United States and the in UK have been carried out looking into this phenomenon and several show that where the ethnicity of interviewer and respondent are matched, the responses yielded are different from those where they are not. These studies also suggest, however, that the interviewer effect only tends to be important when the subject of the survey is sensitive to the respondents' ethnicity or cultural background — which is what we found.
