Social distance and interviewer effects

 The problem of interviewer effects can be divided into two questions: Which types of interviewers affect which types of respondents? What is the direction of the biasing effect on what topics? Much of the available evidence on the first question suggests that bias is found where there is a difference in status between interviewer and respondent. The article draws on earlier studies suggesting that disparities in social class, race, religion, and sex also produced bias in responses and that white interviewers biased the responses of high-status black respondents less than those of low-status black respondents. This finding is not accounted for by the all-or-none status homophile model of interviewer effects, but suggests instead that these effects are related to degree of status dissimilarity.