Week 10: Various Demographic Measures

Demographic measures are questions that allow pollsters and other survey researchers to identify nonopin-ion characteristics of a respondent, such as age, race, and educational attainment. Demographic measures typically are used to identify key respondent characteristics that might influence opinion and/or are correlated with behaviors and experiences. These questions are usually found at the end of a questionnaire. Reasons for this are (a) to engage or otherwise build rapport with the respondent by asking substantive questions of interest earlier in the questionnaire; (b) to lessen the likelihood that asking these personal questions will lead to a refusal to continue completing the questionnaire (i.e. a breakoff); (c) to prevent priming the respondent; and (d) to allow the respondent to answer the core questions before possibly boring him ...