Racial Attitudes and Race of Interviewer Item Non-Response

Abstract

We evaluate the relationship between race of interviewer (ROI) and racial attitudes, using original telephone survey data that includes a response to the question: " What is my race? " A large percentage of our respondents answer, " don't know. " Traditional racial attitude models tend to exclude ROI altogether, whereas alternative racial attitude models include perceived ROI but drop " don't know " respondents. We propose a new modeling strategy that includes " don't know " respondents and find that in general this modeling strategy is preferred because it leads to better model fit and fewer type II errors. We suggest that researchers control for " don't know " ROI responses in any analysis of racial attitudes.