>On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Richard Burkholder was quoted as saying:
>
>> Furthermore, a substantial 85% of Baghdad's residents said they agree
>> with the assertion that "some people believe if the U.S. were to pull
>> out its troops any time soon, Iraq will fall into anarchy." Just 11%
>> said they disagree with this assessment.
>
>I'm a big fan of your Burkholder interview. I was very impressed by how
>seriously he had thought through the problems of trying to canvass
>people's opinion in such a situation and the subtlety and directness of
>the various means by which he and his team had tried to come to terms with
>them. So I was wondering if something got elided in the sentence above.
>Because as stated, it sounds like trick question -- that it doesn't
>actually tell you what people think, but what they think "some" people
>think. Almost a push-poll question.
I forwarded your query to Burkholder, who answers:
>Thanks for your note, and thanks also for passing along the comment from
>your listener.
>
>He or she is absolutely right in spotting the problematic nature of that
>question wording -- at least as it was back-translated into English.
>
>Explanation is that we added this one item to the final questionnaire just
>before we began the fieldwork, and I relayed it verbally to our field
>lieutenant and fellow project director (Jihad Fakhreddine) for translation.
>He maintains that what we really asked in Arabic was slightly more wordy,
>but very close to what we intended -- it translates as: "Some people believe
>that if the U.S. were to pull its troops out any time soon, Iraq will fall
>into anarchy... do you agree or disagree with that view?" (or 'with that
>assessment').
>
>It later got truncated somehow in the back-translation of the written
>questionnaire to English.
>
>Incidentally, Jihad himself is a fascinating interview, and his English is
>arguably better than my own. We are about to begin a second "wave" of that
>survey, and after it's completed (probably late February) I'll let you know
>-- might be fun to call and interview him. He's based in Dubai.
>
>Again, thanks. Please feel free to pass this along to your listener as well
>-- "good eye, good call" as my son would say...