Ethnicity-of-Interviewer Effects on Ethnic Respondents

Considerable research has been reported on race-of-interviewereffects in white/black dichotomies. Little is known, however,about interviewer effects on respondents representing otherethnic groups. This article reports on a 1975 study of ethnicity-of-interviewereffects among four ethnic minorities (Cubans, Chicanos, NativeAmericans, and Chinese) and suggests that the findings for blacksand whites are generalizable to other ethnic groups as well.     

Proof by Certainty Equivalents That Diversification-Across-Time Does Worse,Risk Corrected,Than Diversification-Throughout-Time

For those with constant relative-risk-aversion, one can calculate an easy and exact measurement of their risk-corrected total return per period by use of an appropriate "power mean". For them, this approach can dramatize the inefficiency of being (say) half the time in each of two independent and identically distributed securities; 100% is then lost of the benefit from being all the time 50-50 in each; actually, being half the time in each is as bad as being all the time in either one, which is equivalent to being completely undiversified. More generally, there is proved here that, for any risk-averse U(W) and time-independent probabilities, optimal diversification within each time period outperforms generically any and all patterns of across-time diversification. The variety of proposed risk-corrected returns can give useful approximations for different classes of investors–widows and orphans, pension fiduciaries, high-flying plungers, and so forth–to replace or extend Markowitz, Sharpe, Treynor, or Modigliani-Modigliani measures of corrected performance.     

The Impact of "No Opinion" Response Options on Data Quality: Non-Attitude Reduction or an Invitation to Satisfice?

According to many seasoned survey researchers, offering a no-opinionoption should reduce the pressure to give substantive responsesfelt by respondents who have no true opinions. By contrast,the survey satisficing perspective suggests that no-opinionoptions may discourage some respondents from doing the cognitivework necessary to report the true opinions they do have. Weaddress these arguments using data from nine experiments carriedout in three household surveys. Attraction to no-opinion optionswas found to be greatest among respondents lowest in cognitiveskills (as measured by educational attainment), among respondentsanswering secretly instead of orally, for questions asked laterin a survey, and among respondents who devoted little effortto the reporting process. The quality of attitude reports obtained(as measured by over-time consistency and responsiveness toa question manipulation) was not compromised by the omissionof no-opinion options. These results suggest that inclusionof no-opinion options in attitude measures may not enhance dataquality and instead may preclude measurement of some meaningfulopinions.     

Insensitivity to the Value of Human Life: A Study of Psychophysical Numbing

A fundamental principle of psychophysics is that people's ability to discriminate change in a physical stimulus diminishes as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. We find that people also exhibit diminished sensitivity in valuing lifesaving interventions against a background of increasing numbers of lives at risk. We call this psychophysical numbing. Studies 1 and 2 found that an intervention saving a fixed number of lives was judged significantly more beneficial when fewer lives were at risk overall. Study 3 found that respondents wanted the minimum number of lives a medical treatment would have to save to merit a fixed amount of funding to be much greater for a disease with a larger number of potential victims than for a disease with a smaller number. The need to better understand the dynamics of psychophysical numbing and to determine its effects on decision making is discussed.