Michael F Schober
Biographic Data
| ID | 218968 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael F Schober |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael F |
| FAMILY NAME | Schober |
| SIGNATURE | SCHOBER M F |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1531-6326 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 307 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Misunderstanding stance in tweets
Participants’ Reported Discomfort with Live Video as a Mode for Answering a Sensitive Survey Question
This study uses qualitative thematic analysis to explore a dataset of open-ended textual responses from 369 online panelists explaining why they rated feeling more or less uncomfortable being asked the same sensitive survey question (“How many sex partners have you had in the last 12 months?”) in a hypothetical live video interview versus in two other interviewer-administered survey modes (in person and by phone) and two self-administered survey …
Audience interaction
Live events are social encounters: people in a live audience do not just react to a work, they react to the people around them. Other people’s laughter, applause, coughing, fidgeting, in-breaths and silences all contribute to the experience of live events. Importantly, these behaviours are not just clues to people’s inner responses – they are public social signals that are actively interpreted by others. As a result, there are a number of connect…
Clarifying question meaning in standardized interviews can improve data quality even though wording may change: A review of the evidence
Survey interviews are conducted to produce objective, accurate information in which interviewers ask questions as worded and their discretionary speech is carefully managed. To limit interviewer influence over answers and reduce between-interviewer variance, Standardized Interviewing (SI) requires interviewers to administer nondirective probes – scripted utterances designed to elicit acceptable answers without leading respondents. To promote the …
New Data in Social and Behavioral Research
A decade ago, in this journal's 75th anniversary special issue, Groves (2011) called for the survey research community to collectively assess the role of what he called "organic" data in scientifically measuring social phenomena.What distinguishes these new potential sources of data-also called "found" (Taylor 2013) or "ready-made" (Salganik 2018)-is that they are not elicited by researchers, but rather are continuously generated by ongoing, ever…
The time it takes to reveal embarrassing information in a mobile phone survey
To explore socially desirable responding in telephone surveys, this study examines response latencies in answers to 27 questions in 319 audio-recorded iPhone interviews from Schober et al. (2015). Response latencies were compared when respondents (a) answered questions on sensitive vs. nonsensitive topics (as classified by online raters); (b) produced more vs. less socially desirable answers; and (c) were interviewed by a professional interviewer…
Respondent mode choice in a smartphone survey
Now that people on mobile devices can easily choose their mode of communication (e.g., voice, text, video), survey designers can potentially allow respondents to answer questions in whatever mode they find momentarily convenient given their circumstances or that they chronically prefer. We conducted an experiment to explore how mode choice affects response quality, participation, and satisfaction in smartphone interviews. A total of 1,260 iPhone …
Rapport in Survey Interactions
Social Media Analyses for Social Measurement
Demonstrations that analyses of social media content can align with measurement from sample surveys have raised the question of whether survey research can be supplemented or even replaced with less costly and burdensome data mining of already-existing or "found" social media content. But just how trustworthy such measurement can be-say, to replace official statistics-is unknown. Survey researchers and data scientists approach key questions from …
Comparisons of Online Recruitment Strategies for Convenience Samples: Craigslist, Google AdWords, Facebook, and Amazon Mechanical Turk
The rise of social media websites (e.g., Facebook) and online services such as Google AdWords and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offers new opportunities for researchers to recruit study participants. Although researchers have started to use these emerging methods, little is known about how they perform in terms of cost efficiency and, more importantly, the types of people that they ultimately recruit. Here, we report findings about the performan…
Reading a Blog When Empowered to Comment: Posting, Lurking, and Non-Interactive Reading
How do readers who are able to post responses on a political blog ("interactive readers") differ in their navigation and comprehension from "noninteractive" readers who are not empowered to post? In this study, a nonpartisan political blog was populated with news content about the then-upcoming 2012 U.S. presidential election. Seventy participants recruited from the Internet were randomly assigned to be either interactive or noninteractive reader…
Mobile Technologies for Conducting, Augmenting and Potentially Replacing Surveys: Executive Summary of the Aapor Task Force on Emerging Technologies in Public Opinion Research
Journal Article Mobile Technologies for Conducting, Augmenting and Potentially Replacing Surveys: Executive Summary of the AAPOR Task Force on Emerging Technologies in Public Opinion Research Get access Michael W. Link, Michael W. Link * Address correspondence to: Michael W. Link, Nielsen, 710 Springer Mountain Rd, Canton, GA 30114; e-mail: [email protected] . Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joe Mur…
Pragmatic Processes in Survey Interviewing
Language pervades everything we do as social beings. It is, in fact, difficult to disentangle language from social life, and hence its importance is often missed. This book is a unique and innovative compilation of research lying at the intersection of language and social psychology. Language is viewed here as a social activity, and to understand this complex human activity requires a consideration of its social psychological underpinnings.
Why Do Survey Respondents Disclose More When Computers Ask the Questions
Journal Article Why Do Survey Respondents Disclose More When Computers Ask the Questions? Get access Laura H. Lind, Laura H. Lind Laura H. Lind is an independent researcher, San Francisco, CA, USA. Michael F. Schober is a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA. Frederick G. Conrad is a research professor in the Survey Research Center and director of the Michigan Program in Survey Methodology at the Univer…
Modeling Speech Disfluency to Predict Conceptual Misalignment in Speech Survey Interfaces
Computer-based interviewing systems could use models of respondent disfluency behaviors to predict a need for clarification of terms in survey questions. This study compares simulated speech interfaces that use two such models–a generic model and a stereotyped model that distinguishes between the speech of younger and older speakers–to several non-modeling speech interfaces in a task where respondents provided answers to survey questions from fic…
Chair and Couch Discourse: A Study of Visual Copresence in Psychoanalysis
In traditional psychoanalysis, patients recline on a couch in a way that prevents pa-tients and analysts from seeing each other’s faces. This has been argued to have sig-nificant effects, both positive and negative, on patients ’ treatment. The use of the couch creates an unusual communicative situation in which both parties are physi-cally but not visually copresent. This study examines the content and form of dis-course in 10 audiorecorded psyc…
Discourse Cues That Respondents Have Misunderstood Survey Questions
When survey respondents ' answers include pauses, stammers, and hedges, does this indicate that they are in danger of misinterpreting the survey question? Or are disfluencies so common in ordinary discourse that they are nondiagnostic? We ana-lyzed respondents ' first utterances after survey questions in a corpus of 42 labora-tory-based telephone interviews (Schober & Conrad, 1997). Because respondents had answered questions on the basis of ficti…
Disfluency Rates in Conversation: Effects of Age, Relationship, Topic, Role, and Gender
After reviewing situational and demographic factors that have been argued to affect speakers' disfluency rates, we examined disfluency rates in a corpus of task-oriented conversations ( Schober & Carstensen, 2001) with variables that might affect fluency rates. These factors included: speakers' ages (young, middle-aged, and older), task roles (director vs. matcher in a referential communication task), difficulty of topic domain (abstract geometri…
Readers' varying interpretations of theme in short fiction
Clarifying Question Meaning in a Household Telephone Survey
This study contrasts two interviewing techniques that reflect different tacit assumptions about communication. In one, strictly standardized interviewing, interviewers leave the interpretation of questions up to respondents. In the other, conversational interviewing, interviewers say whatever it takes to make sure that questions are interpreted uniformly and as intended. Respondents from a national sample were interviewed twice. Each time they we…
How beliefs about a partner's goals affect referring in goal‐discrepant conversations
This study examines how interlocutors’ beliefs about each other's goals (partner‐goal beliefs) affect conversational references. Pairs of participants whose mismatched conversational goals required getting information at a more or less specific level discussed abstract shapes. Pairs were either informed of the goal difference, misinformed that goals were the same, or noninformed about the goal difference. Partner‐goal beliefs affected how partici…
Does Conversational Interviewing Reduce Survey Measurement Error
Standardized survey interviewing is widely advocated in order to reduce interviewer-related error, for example by Fowler and Mangione.But Suchman and Jordan argue that standardized wording may decrease response accuracy because it prevents the conversational flexibility that respondents need in order to understand questions as survey designers intended.We propose that the arguments for these competing positions-standardized versus flexible interv…
Speakers, addressees, and frames of reference: Whose effort is minimized in conversations about locations
When speakers describe locations, they must choose among taking their own perspective, their addressee's, a shared frame of reference, and a neutral frame of reference that avoids the issue, among other options. This study examines whether speakers choose spatial perspectives that minimize effort for themselves, for their partners, or for both. It also examines whether perspectives are taken for particular individuals, for the speaker or addresse…
Understanding by addressees and overhearers
Does Conversational Interviewing Reduce Survey Measurement Error
Standardized survey interviewing is widely advocated in order to reduce interviewer-related error, for example by Fowler and Mangione.But Suchman and Jordan argue that standardized wording may decrease response accuracy because it prevents the conversational flexibility that respondents need in order to understand questions as survey designers intended.We propose that the arguments for these competing positions-standardized versus flexible interv…
Disfluency Rates in Conversation: Effects of Age, Relationship, Topic, Role, and Gender
After reviewing situational and demographic factors that have been argued to affect speakers' disfluency rates, we examined disfluency rates in a corpus of task-oriented conversations ( Schober & Carstensen, 2001) with variables that might affect fluency rates. These factors included: speakers' ages (young, middle-aged, and older), task roles (director vs. matcher in a referential communication task), difficulty of topic domain (abstract geometri…
Social Media Analyses for Social Measurement
Demonstrations that analyses of social media content can align with measurement from sample surveys have raised the question of whether survey research can be supplemented or even replaced with less costly and burdensome data mining of already-existing or "found" social media content. But just how trustworthy such measurement can be-say, to replace official statistics-is unknown. Survey researchers and data scientists approach key questions from …
Clarifying Question Meaning in a Household Telephone Survey
This study contrasts two interviewing techniques that reflect different tacit assumptions about communication. In one, strictly standardized interviewing, interviewers leave the interpretation of questions up to respondents. In the other, conversational interviewing, interviewers say whatever it takes to make sure that questions are interpreted uniformly and as intended. Respondents from a national sample were interviewed twice. Each time they we…
Mobile Technologies for Conducting, Augmenting and Potentially Replacing Surveys: Executive Summary of the Aapor Task Force on Emerging Technologies in Public Opinion Research
Journal Article Mobile Technologies for Conducting, Augmenting and Potentially Replacing Surveys: Executive Summary of the AAPOR Task Force on Emerging Technologies in Public Opinion Research Get access Michael W. Link, Michael W. Link * Address correspondence to: Michael W. Link, Nielsen, 710 Springer Mountain Rd, Canton, GA 30114; e-mail: [email protected] . Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joe Mur…
Speakers, addressees, and frames of reference: Whose effort is minimized in conversations about locations
When speakers describe locations, they must choose among taking their own perspective, their addressee's, a shared frame of reference, and a neutral frame of reference that avoids the issue, among other options. This study examines whether speakers choose spatial perspectives that minimize effort for themselves, for their partners, or for both. It also examines whether perspectives are taken for particular individuals, for the speaker or addresse…
Why Do Survey Respondents Disclose More When Computers Ask the Questions
Journal Article Why Do Survey Respondents Disclose More When Computers Ask the Questions? Get access Laura H. Lind, Laura H. Lind Laura H. Lind is an independent researcher, San Francisco, CA, USA. Michael F. Schober is a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA. Frederick G. Conrad is a research professor in the Survey Research Center and director of the Michigan Program in Survey Methodology at the Univer…
Comparisons of Online Recruitment Strategies for Convenience Samples: Craigslist, Google AdWords, Facebook, and Amazon Mechanical Turk
The rise of social media websites (e.g., Facebook) and online services such as Google AdWords and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offers new opportunities for researchers to recruit study participants. Although researchers have started to use these emerging methods, little is known about how they perform in terms of cost efficiency and, more importantly, the types of people that they ultimately recruit. Here, we report findings about the performan…
How beliefs about a partner's goals affect referring in goal‐discrepant conversations
This study examines how interlocutors’ beliefs about each other's goals (partner‐goal beliefs) affect conversational references. Pairs of participants whose mismatched conversational goals required getting information at a more or less specific level discussed abstract shapes. Pairs were either informed of the goal difference, misinformed that goals were the same, or noninformed about the goal difference. Partner‐goal beliefs affected how partici…
Discourse Cues That Respondents Have Misunderstood Survey Questions
When survey respondents ' answers include pauses, stammers, and hedges, does this indicate that they are in danger of misinterpreting the survey question? Or are disfluencies so common in ordinary discourse that they are nondiagnostic? We ana-lyzed respondents ' first utterances after survey questions in a corpus of 42 labora-tory-based telephone interviews (Schober & Conrad, 1997). Because respondents had answered questions on the basis of ficti…
New Data in Social and Behavioral Research
A decade ago, in this journal's 75th anniversary special issue, Groves (2011) called for the survey research community to collectively assess the role of what he called "organic" data in scientifically measuring social phenomena.What distinguishes these new potential sources of data-also called "found" (Taylor 2013) or "ready-made" (Salganik 2018)-is that they are not elicited by researchers, but rather are continuously generated by ongoing, ever…
Respondent mode choice in a smartphone survey
Now that people on mobile devices can easily choose their mode of communication (e.g., voice, text, video), survey designers can potentially allow respondents to answer questions in whatever mode they find momentarily convenient given their circumstances or that they chronically prefer. We conducted an experiment to explore how mode choice affects response quality, participation, and satisfaction in smartphone interviews. A total of 1,260 iPhone …
Readers' varying interpretations of theme in short fiction
Modeling Speech Disfluency to Predict Conceptual Misalignment in Speech Survey Interfaces
Computer-based interviewing systems could use models of respondent disfluency behaviors to predict a need for clarification of terms in survey questions. This study compares simulated speech interfaces that use two such models–a generic model and a stereotyped model that distinguishes between the speech of younger and older speakers–to several non-modeling speech interfaces in a task where respondents provided answers to survey questions from fic…
Misunderstanding stance in tweets
The time it takes to reveal embarrassing information in a mobile phone survey
To explore socially desirable responding in telephone surveys, this study examines response latencies in answers to 27 questions in 319 audio-recorded iPhone interviews from Schober et al. (2015). Response latencies were compared when respondents (a) answered questions on sensitive vs. nonsensitive topics (as classified by online raters); (b) produced more vs. less socially desirable answers; and (c) were interviewed by a professional interviewer…
Chair and Couch Discourse: A Study of Visual Copresence in Psychoanalysis
In traditional psychoanalysis, patients recline on a couch in a way that prevents pa-tients and analysts from seeing each other’s faces. This has been argued to have sig-nificant effects, both positive and negative, on patients ’ treatment. The use of the couch creates an unusual communicative situation in which both parties are physi-cally but not visually copresent. This study examines the content and form of dis-course in 10 audiorecorded psyc…
Reading a Blog When Empowered to Comment: Posting, Lurking, and Non-Interactive Reading
How do readers who are able to post responses on a political blog ("interactive readers") differ in their navigation and comprehension from "noninteractive" readers who are not empowered to post? In this study, a nonpartisan political blog was populated with news content about the then-upcoming 2012 U.S. presidential election. Seventy participants recruited from the Internet were randomly assigned to be either interactive or noninteractive reader…
Understanding by addressees and overhearers
Speakers, addressees, and frames of reference: Whose effort is minimized in conversations about locations
When speakers describe locations, they must choose among taking their own perspective, their addressee's, a shared frame of reference, and a neutral frame of reference that avoids the issue, among other options. This study examines whether speakers choose spatial perspectives that minimize effort for themselves, for their partners, or for both. It also examines whether perspectives are taken for particular individuals, for the speaker or addresse…
Does Conversational Interviewing Reduce Survey Measurement Error
Standardized survey interviewing is widely advocated in order to reduce interviewer-related error, for example by Fowler and Mangione.But Suchman and Jordan argue that standardized wording may decrease response accuracy because it prevents the conversational flexibility that respondents need in order to understand questions as survey designers intended.We propose that the arguments for these competing positions-standardized versus flexible interv…
How beliefs about a partner's goals affect referring in goal‐discrepant conversations
This study examines how interlocutors’ beliefs about each other's goals (partner‐goal beliefs) affect conversational references. Pairs of participants whose mismatched conversational goals required getting information at a more or less specific level discussed abstract shapes. Pairs were either informed of the goal difference, misinformed that goals were the same, or noninformed about the goal difference. Partner‐goal beliefs affected how partici…
Clarifying Question Meaning in a Household Telephone Survey
This study contrasts two interviewing techniques that reflect different tacit assumptions about communication. In one, strictly standardized interviewing, interviewers leave the interpretation of questions up to respondents. In the other, conversational interviewing, interviewers say whatever it takes to make sure that questions are interpreted uniformly and as intended. Respondents from a national sample were interviewed twice. Each time they we…
Disfluency Rates in Conversation: Effects of Age, Relationship, Topic, Role, and Gender
After reviewing situational and demographic factors that have been argued to affect speakers' disfluency rates, we examined disfluency rates in a corpus of task-oriented conversations ( Schober & Carstensen, 2001) with variables that might affect fluency rates. These factors included: speakers' ages (young, middle-aged, and older), task roles (director vs. matcher in a referential communication task), difficulty of topic domain (abstract geometri…
Readers' varying interpretations of theme in short fiction
Discourse Cues That Respondents Have Misunderstood Survey Questions
When survey respondents ' answers include pauses, stammers, and hedges, does this indicate that they are in danger of misinterpreting the survey question? Or are disfluencies so common in ordinary discourse that they are nondiagnostic? We ana-lyzed respondents ' first utterances after survey questions in a corpus of 42 labora-tory-based telephone interviews (Schober & Conrad, 1997). Because respondents had answered questions on the basis of ficti…
Chair and Couch Discourse: A Study of Visual Copresence in Psychoanalysis
In traditional psychoanalysis, patients recline on a couch in a way that prevents pa-tients and analysts from seeing each other’s faces. This has been argued to have sig-nificant effects, both positive and negative, on patients ’ treatment. The use of the couch creates an unusual communicative situation in which both parties are physi-cally but not visually copresent. This study examines the content and form of dis-course in 10 audiorecorded psyc…
Modeling Speech Disfluency to Predict Conceptual Misalignment in Speech Survey Interfaces
Computer-based interviewing systems could use models of respondent disfluency behaviors to predict a need for clarification of terms in survey questions. This study compares simulated speech interfaces that use two such models–a generic model and a stereotyped model that distinguishes between the speech of younger and older speakers–to several non-modeling speech interfaces in a task where respondents provided answers to survey questions from fic…
Pragmatic Processes in Survey Interviewing
Language pervades everything we do as social beings. It is, in fact, difficult to disentangle language from social life, and hence its importance is often missed. This book is a unique and innovative compilation of research lying at the intersection of language and social psychology. Language is viewed here as a social activity, and to understand this complex human activity requires a consideration of its social psychological underpinnings.
Why Do Survey Respondents Disclose More When Computers Ask the Questions
Journal Article Why Do Survey Respondents Disclose More When Computers Ask the Questions? Get access Laura H. Lind, Laura H. Lind Laura H. Lind is an independent researcher, San Francisco, CA, USA. Michael F. Schober is a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA. Frederick G. Conrad is a research professor in the Survey Research Center and director of the Michigan Program in Survey Methodology at the Univer…
Mobile Technologies for Conducting, Augmenting and Potentially Replacing Surveys: Executive Summary of the Aapor Task Force on Emerging Technologies in Public Opinion Research
Journal Article Mobile Technologies for Conducting, Augmenting and Potentially Replacing Surveys: Executive Summary of the AAPOR Task Force on Emerging Technologies in Public Opinion Research Get access Michael W. Link, Michael W. Link * Address correspondence to: Michael W. Link, Nielsen, 710 Springer Mountain Rd, Canton, GA 30114; e-mail: [email protected] . Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joe Mur…
Reading a Blog When Empowered to Comment: Posting, Lurking, and Non-Interactive Reading
How do readers who are able to post responses on a political blog ("interactive readers") differ in their navigation and comprehension from "noninteractive" readers who are not empowered to post? In this study, a nonpartisan political blog was populated with news content about the then-upcoming 2012 U.S. presidential election. Seventy participants recruited from the Internet were randomly assigned to be either interactive or noninteractive reader…
Rapport in Survey Interactions
Social Media Analyses for Social Measurement
Demonstrations that analyses of social media content can align with measurement from sample surveys have raised the question of whether survey research can be supplemented or even replaced with less costly and burdensome data mining of already-existing or "found" social media content. But just how trustworthy such measurement can be-say, to replace official statistics-is unknown. Survey researchers and data scientists approach key questions from …
Comparisons of Online Recruitment Strategies for Convenience Samples: Craigslist, Google AdWords, Facebook, and Amazon Mechanical Turk
The rise of social media websites (e.g., Facebook) and online services such as Google AdWords and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offers new opportunities for researchers to recruit study participants. Although researchers have started to use these emerging methods, little is known about how they perform in terms of cost efficiency and, more importantly, the types of people that they ultimately recruit. Here, we report findings about the performan…
Respondent mode choice in a smartphone survey
Now that people on mobile devices can easily choose their mode of communication (e.g., voice, text, video), survey designers can potentially allow respondents to answer questions in whatever mode they find momentarily convenient given their circumstances or that they chronically prefer. We conducted an experiment to explore how mode choice affects response quality, participation, and satisfaction in smartphone interviews. A total of 1,260 iPhone …
The time it takes to reveal embarrassing information in a mobile phone survey
To explore socially desirable responding in telephone surveys, this study examines response latencies in answers to 27 questions in 319 audio-recorded iPhone interviews from Schober et al. (2015). Response latencies were compared when respondents (a) answered questions on sensitive vs. nonsensitive topics (as classified by online raters); (b) produced more vs. less socially desirable answers; and (c) were interviewed by a professional interviewer…
Clarifying question meaning in standardized interviews can improve data quality even though wording may change: A review of the evidence
Survey interviews are conducted to produce objective, accurate information in which interviewers ask questions as worded and their discretionary speech is carefully managed. To limit interviewer influence over answers and reduce between-interviewer variance, Standardized Interviewing (SI) requires interviewers to administer nondirective probes – scripted utterances designed to elicit acceptable answers without leading respondents. To promote the …
New Data in Social and Behavioral Research
A decade ago, in this journal's 75th anniversary special issue, Groves (2011) called for the survey research community to collectively assess the role of what he called "organic" data in scientifically measuring social phenomena.What distinguishes these new potential sources of data-also called "found" (Taylor 2013) or "ready-made" (Salganik 2018)-is that they are not elicited by researchers, but rather are continuously generated by ongoing, ever…
Audience interaction
Live events are social encounters: people in a live audience do not just react to a work, they react to the people around them. Other people’s laughter, applause, coughing, fidgeting, in-breaths and silences all contribute to the experience of live events. Importantly, these behaviours are not just clues to people’s inner responses – they are public social signals that are actively interpreted by others. As a result, there are a number of connect…
Misunderstanding stance in tweets
Participants’ Reported Discomfort with Live Video as a Mode for Answering a Sensitive Survey Question
This study uses qualitative thematic analysis to explore a dataset of open-ended textual responses from 369 online panelists explaining why they rated feeling more or less uncomfortable being asked the same sensitive survey question (“How many sex partners have you had in the last 12 months?”) in a hypothetical live video interview versus in two other interviewer-administered survey modes (in person and by phone) and two self-administered survey …
Psychology (22 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Survey Methodology and Nonresponse (10 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (8 works) · Interview (7 works) · Speech and dialogue systems (7 works)