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Individual style in an American pubic opinion survey: Personal performance and the ideology of referentiality1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Barbara Johnstone
Barbara Johnstone
Affiliation:
Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4227
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Abstract

The anonymous telephone public opinion survey is supposed to be invariant. Interviewers' individual linguistic styles are supposed to be suppressed. However, transcripts of interviews show that no two interviewers perform the task alike. Interviewers make changes in the scripted introduction and add unscripted answer-acknowledgments and commentary throughout the interviews, the effect of which is to point up their identities as individuals rather than merely fillers of the interviewer role. Much of the deviation can be explained by the heightened requirement for politeness in the “cold call,” for Americans one of the most egregious of interactional impositions. But no two interviewers fulfill this requirement in quite the same way. This may be because Americans value individuality in discourse, so that in order to be polite it is necessary to perform a differentiated, individual self. Such an understanding of personhood, and its linguistic ramifications, conflicts with the positivistic understanding of language on which survey research is based. In light of the amount of individual variation where one might not expect to find it, I suggest that linguists focus attention on the individual voice. (Individual variation, individual voice, interviewing, public opinion polls, survey research, politeness)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 557 - 576
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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