Method and meaning in Holocaust-knowledge surveys

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 454-474

  Bischoping, Katherine ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0009430727     PISSN: 87566583     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hgs/12.3.454     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Burns W. Roper, "Our Holocaust Survey," paper presented at the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Danvers, MA, May 1994
2. Jennifer Golub and Renae Cohen, "What Do Americans Know about the Holocaust?" in Working Papers on Contemporary Anti-Semitism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1993)
3. Edward Alexander, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas (New York: Transaction, 1994), p. 2
4. David W. Moore and Frank Newport, "Misreading the Public: The Case of the Holocaust Poll," The Public Perspective (March-April 1994), pp. 28-29
5. See Moore and Newport; Tom W. Smith, Holocaust Denial: What the Survey Data Reveal (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1994)
6. The conclusion that a consistent level of incorrect responses indicates an absolute level of ignorance about the Holocaust is surprising, given scaling theorists' accounts of why such levels cannot be estimated [John P. McIver and Edward G. Carmines, "Unidimensional Scaling," in Sage University Paper series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), pp. 7-24] and the numerous critiques of the limitations of marginal distributions. Moreover, Smith's comprehensive review of surveys on the Holocaust and World War II shows considerable variation in the levels of correct answers, while my own survey result shows that these levels are highly variable (Table 1) ["Holocaust Denial"]. Thus, it is clear that the uniform level of incorrect answers obtained in the AJC survey is an anomaly rather than an indication of a reliable estimate of public ignorance
7. Debra J. Saunders, "Poll Shows America in Deep Dumbo," The San Francisco Chronicle April 23, 1993, p. 30, section A
8. James A. Davis, "On the Remarkable Absence of Nonacademic Implications in Academic Research: An Example from Ethnic Studies," in M. J. Demerath, O. Larson, and K. F. Schuessler, eds. Social Policy and Sociology (New York: Academic, 1975), pp. 233-41
9. Katherine Bischoping, "Interpreting Social Influences on Holocaust Knowledge," Contemporary Jewry 17 (1996), pp. 106-37
10. See Holocaust-knowledge scale in John J. Sigal and Morton Weinfeld, Trauma and Rebirth (New York: Praeger, 1989)
11. Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (New York: Macmillan, 1971). The occasional faulty description had so much detail that it seemed to have some concrete referent. For example, one student who thought Anne Frank might be "the Jewish American athlete who boycotted the Olympics in Germany" might have confused her with one of a small number of athletes involved in a boycott
12. Tom W. Smith, "Non-attitudes: A Review and Evaluation," in Charles Turner and Elizabeth Martin, eds. Surveying Subjective Phenomena, vol. 2 (New York: Sage, 1984), pp. 215-55. The method used in this section is analogous to a method in the study of non-attitudes and hidden non-attitudes, which Smith terms the "imputed-understanding model." When faced with a question they do not understand, respondents who act in accordance to this model base their answers on guesses about plausible meanings of the question. This model is distinct from other non-attitude models in which respondents are hypothesized to answer randomly or to choose among responses that appear socially desirable. Similarly, in this section, I treat incorrect answers (other than "don't knows") as though they have an internal logic, and not as though they are randomly produced
13. Barbara S. Benavie, "The Holocaust: Something for Everybody," Jewish Digest 27:5 (1982), pp. 3-6
14. Siegfried Zielinsla, "History as Entertainment and Provocation: The TV series 'Holocaust' in West Germany," New German Critique 19 (Winter 1990), pp. 81-96
15. John S. Conway, "The Holocaust and the Historians," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 450 (1980), pp. 153-64
16. Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1981)
17. Judith Miller, One, by One, by One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990)
18. Harold Schulweis, "The Holocaust Dybbuk," Moment 1:7 (1976), pp. 36-41
19. Maurice Halbwachs, as cited in Barry Schwartz, "Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington," American Sociological Review 56 (April 1991), p. 221
20. Gordon Allport and Leo J. Postman, "The Basic Psychology of Rumor," Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II 8 (1945), pp. 61-81
21. Alvin Rosenfeld, "Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank," in Peter Hayes, ed. Lessons and Legacies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1991), pp. 243-78
22. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin, 1965)
23. Francois Rochat and Andre Modigliani, "The Ordinary Quality of Resistance: From Milgram's Laboratory to the Village of Le Chambon," Journal of Social Issues 51:3 (1995), pp. 195-210
24. George Kren and Leon Rappaport, "The Holocaust and the Human Condition," in Roger S. Gottlieb, ed. Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (New York: Paulist, 1990), p. 348
25. Arlie R. Hochschild, "The Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected Possibilities," in Marcia Millman and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, eds. Another Voice: Feminist Perspectives on Social Life and Social Science (New York: Anchor, 1975), p. 281
26. Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Theory and Method (Los Angeles: University of California, 1969)
27. Donald Fleming, "Attitude: The History of a Concept," Perspectives in American History 1 (1967), pp. 287-365
28. Icek Ajzen, Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980)
29. Daryl J. Bern, Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1970)
30. Russell H. Fazio, "How Do Attitudes Guide Behavior?" in Richard M. Sorrentino and E. Tory Higgins, eds. Handbook of Motivation and Cognition (New York: Guilford, 1986), pp. 204-43
31. Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen, Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1974)
32. Don A. Dillman, Mail and Telephone Surveys (New York: Wiley, 1978), p. 80
33. Hochschild, 'The Sociology of Feeling" and "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure," American Journal of Sociology 85:3 (1979), pp. 551-75
34. Judith V. Jordan, "Empathy and Self Boundaries," in Work in Progress No. 16 (Wellesley, Massachusetts: Wellesley College, Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, 1984), p. 3
35. See also Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer, "Critical Issues in the Study of Empathy," in Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer, eds. Empathy and its Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 3-16
36. Mary F. Belenky, Blythe M.Clinchy, Nancy R. Goldberger, and Jill M. Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing (New York: BasicBooks, 1986)
37. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)
38. Randy Lennon and Nancy Eisenberg, "Gender and Age Differences in Empathy and Sympathy," in Empathy and Its Development, pp. 195-217
39. Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial," in Richard Hovannisian, ed. The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (Oxford: Transaction, 1986), pp. 111-33
40. Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo, Communication and Persuasion (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986)
41. Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993)
42. Katherine Bischoping, "Responses to Holocaust Denial: A Case Study at the University of Michigan," Contemporary Jewry 18 (1997), pp. 44-59
43. Melvin Lerner, The Belief in a Just World (New York: Plenum, 1980)
44. Samuel R Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality (New York: Free Press, 1988)
45. Ervin Staub, "Transforming the Bystanders: Altruism, Caring, and Social Responsibility," in Helen Fein, ed. Genocide Watch (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1992), pp. 162-81
46. Slavenka Drakulić, Balkan Express (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), pp. 144-45
47. Although I recommend that empathy and other emotions be incorporated into Holocaust-knowledge surveys, a second strain of bystander-intervention research dismisses individual-level personality characteristics. In it, psychological processes are seen as highly malleable and less likely than cultural or structural factors to determine intervention. See Helen Fein, "Genocide: A Sociological Perspective," Current Sociology 38:1 (1990)
48. William Gamson, "Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the Politics of Exclusion," American Sociological Review 60 (February 1995), pp. 1-20
49. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper & Row, 1974)
50. Andre Modigliani and Francois Rochat, "The Role of Interaction Sequences and the Timing of Resistance in Shaping Obedience and Defiance to Authority," Journal of Social Issues 51:3 (1995), pp. 107-23
51. Smith, "Holocaust Denial," p. 23
52. Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys (New York: Academic, 1981)
53. Marcia Heiman and Joshua Slomianko, Critical Thinking Skills (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association of the United States, 1985)
54. Matthew Lipman, Thinking in Education (New York: Cambridge University, 1991)
55. Lauren Resnick, Education and Learning to Think (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1987)
56. Harvey Siegel, Educating Reason (New York: Routledge, 1988)
57. Occasional efforts to measure higher-order skills with closed questions have been made, as in the question: "For each of the following, please tell me if you think it is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust or not. (a) Finn steps need to be taken to protect the rights of minorities. (b) There is no hope for the human race. (c) People must speak out against oppression so that another Holocaust will not happen." See Golub and Cohen, pp. 42-46. However, such questions relieve respondents of the burden of generating ideas, and therefore measure higher-level thinking poorly
58. See Siegel; Glen Evans, Learning and Teaching Cognitive Skills (Victoria, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1991)
59. Richard Paul, "McPeck's Mistakes," in John E. McPeck, ed. Teaching Critical Thinking: Dialogue and Dialectic (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 102-11
60. John E. McPeck, Teaching Critical Thinking: Dialogue and Dialectic (New York: Routledge, 1990)
61. Edna Bonacich, "A Theory of Middleman Minorities," American Sociological Review 38 (October 1973), pp. 583-94
62. See Fein; Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)
63. Leo Kuper, Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981)
64. Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
65. Edward Alexander, "Stealing the Holocaust," Midstream 26:9 (1980), pp. 46-51
66. Yehuda Bauer, "Whose Holocaust?" Midstream 26:9 (1980), pp. 42-46
67. William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 423
68. See Schuman and Presser; Richard LaPiere, "Attitudes Versus Actions," Social Forces 13 (1934), pp. 230-37
69. Howard Schuman and Michael P. Johnson, "Attitudes and Behavior," Annual Review of Sociology 2 (1976), pp. 161-207
70. Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, "Effects of Public Opinion on Policy," The American Political Science Review 77 (1983), pp. 175-90
71. Aaron Cicourel, Method and Measurement in Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 35