AMERICAN POLITICS QUARTERLY / OCTOBER 1999Leal, Hess / A E ALL SUBJECTS INTERVIEWED EQUALLY? SURVEY BIAS ON THE FRONT PORCH Are All Subjects Interviewed Equally?

We examine whether survey interviewers are biased in their views of certain classes of respon-dents, thereby introducing unobserved bias into survey results. There has been a great deal of previous research on how racial and gender dynamics affect the responses given by respondents during face-to-face surveys. In this article, we turn this issue around and ask whether human interaction affects how the interviewer views the respondents, and if so, how this may systemati-cally bias surveys. If interviewers are biased, this may impede their ability to conduct interviews in a consistent, nonjudgmental, and unbiased manner. Using three surveys that required the inter-viewer to evaluate how informed and intelligent the respondents appeared, we found that inter-viewers were more likely to evaluate respondents of lower socioeconomic status as less informed and less intelligent, even after controlling for objective levels of political information. There is also evidence that Blacks may be negatively evaluated. In this article we examine whether survey interviewers are biased in their views of certain classes of respondents, thereby introducing unobserved bias into survey results. There has been a great deal of pre-vious research on how racial and gender dynamics affect the responses given by respondents during face-to-face surveys, but not on the ques-tion of how interviewer perceptions may shape responses. If inter-viewers are positively or negatively disposed toward certain classes of respondents, this may impede their ability to conduct interviews in a consistent, nonjudgmental, and unbiased manner. Previous research has noted that face-to-face interviews are par-ticularly susceptible to bias because of the dynamics of personal con-tact between interviewer and respondent. Especially well investigated Authors’Note: The authors would like to thank D. Stephen Voss, Marc Hetherington, the anony-mous reviewers, and the editor for their helpful comments. The names of the authors appear in random order. This article was an equal collaboration