© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com INTERVIEWER GENDER EFFECTS ON SURVEY RESPONSES TO MARRIAGE-RELATED QUESTIONS MINGNAN LIU* KEVIN STAINBACK Abstract This article explores how interviewer gender influences responses to marriage-related questions in face-to-face surveys utiliz- ing the 2006 China General Social Survey (CGSS). The specific mar- riage items examined concern respondent’s views of the happiness of married people and normative views of marriage and ask: (a) whether married men are happier than unmarried men; (b) whether married women are happier than unmarried women; (c) whether getting mar- ried is better than being single; and (d) whether staying married is bet- ter than getting divorced. Drawing from social desirability theory, this article examines two specific research questions. First, does the gender of the interviewer influence respondents’ normative views of marriage? Second, do the effects of interviewer’s gender on these questions differ for male and female respondents? The results provide mixed support for gender-of-interviewer effects. Consistent with social desirability theory, the findings indicate that female interviewers elicit more pro-marriage and neutral responses than negative responses to the first two items than male interviewers. For the most part, social desirability theory was not supported for the last two items. Gender differences in the susceptibility to gender of interviewer effects were inconsistent across models. Mingnan Liu is a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Social Research, Program in Survey Methodology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. Kevin Stainback is associate professor of sociology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. The authors would like to thank Sarah Mustillo, J. Jill Suitor, James M. Lepkowski, Nicholas Vargas, and the Public Opinion Quarterly editors and reviewers for their feedback on previous drafts of this manuscript. A previous version of this article was presented at the 66th Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Phoenix, Arizona. Data analyzed in this paper were collected by the research project “China General Social Survey,” sponsored by the China Social Science Foundation. This research project was carried out by the Department of Sociology, Renmin University of China and Social Science Division, Hong Kong Science and Technology University, and directed by Dr. Li Lulu and Dr. Bian Yanjie. The authors thank the aforementioned institutes and individuals for their assistance in providing data. The views expressed herein are the authors’ own. *Address correspondence to Mingnan Liu, Program in Survey Methodology, Institute for Social Research, 426 Thompson Street, Room 4050, Ann Arbor, MI 48104, USA; e-mail: Liumn@umich.edu. Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 2, Summer 2013, pp. 606–618 doi:10.1093/poq/nft019 Advance Access publication 3 June 2013 at University of Michigan on March 23, 2014 http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from