The Effect of Question Wording on Public Support for Government Spending

Abstract

Analyses of question wording experiments on the General Social Survey showed consistent wording effects for several issues across three years. An examination of types of wording change indicate that even minor changes can affect responses. However, an examination of interactions with respondent individual differences showed no consistent pattern. Since 1973 the General Social Survey has included questions that ask the public to evaluate a variety of government policies. These spending items have played an important role in tracking public support for government fiscal involvement in 15 key policy areas such as defense, aid to minorities, education, and foreign aid. However, since most of the issues in the item questions can be de- scribed using a variety of labels, each potentially evoking a different symbol (Fee, 1981), and since the choice of a label for an issue can dramatically affect responses (Smith, 1987), it seemed natural to ex- plore whether support for these issues depended upon the choice of words used to describe them.

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