A General Social Survey Experiment in Generic Words

This paper analyses a question wording experiment from the 1980General Social Survey. The experiment used two variants of aseries of items that asked for evaluations of qualities forchildren. The experimental variation used the noun "child" consistently;the standard variation used the pronoun "he" and the noun "child."There were no differences between the two wordings in the waythe traits were evaluated. The lack of a question wording effectcan be partly attributed to the fact that both wordings arebiased in favor of males. Question wording interacted with respondentsex in affecting the sex of the child that respondents claimedto be considering when answering the trait items.     

HARDLY EVER OR CONSTANTLY? GROUP COMPARISONS USING VAGUE QUANTIFIERS

Investigations of vague quantifiers—phrases like "veryoften," which express frequency in relative terms—haveleft the consequences of analyzing absolute or relative responseslargely unexplored. This paper examines whether the choice ofrelative or absolute frequencies affects comparisons by race,sex, education, and age and the meaning of relative-frequencyand relative-intensity phrases for these groups. Items analyzedare the frequency of excitement and boredom (using a 1975 nationalprobability sample of households with quotas, N=1,172). Conclusionsabout race differences in excitement and boredom differ forabsolute and relative frequencies. There are significant differencesby race, education, and age in the meaning of phrases conveyingrelative frequency: such phrases stand for higher absolute frequenciesfor whites, for better educated, and for younger respondents.