All polls are subject to a great many variables including the tendency of subjects to wish to give the answer they think the interviewer wants. Good pollsters can guard against that
True, and in any poll of Arabs you must ask yourself, can the responder lose face or be accused of disloyalty with one answer or the other? Americans may just want to please the interviewer, but I think Arabs have real cultural pressure to give the proper and face-maintaining answer.
Reminds me of something I read the other day, where a Palestinian was discussing the refugee question. Talking to his own father, a refugee from Haifa, he asked, "Would you want to go back?" His father replied, "No, not under Israeli rule, it is no longer my Haifa". But when a pollster asked him the same question, he said "Of course, I would want to go back -- I long for Haifa!"
My reaction was, sheesh, you need a degree in psychiatry to understand Arabs ;-) |
