Sex and risk: How interviewer's gender affects responses on self-reported risk attitude

The so-called "interviewer effect", that is the influence of the interviewer's characteristics and behaviours on interviewee's responses, is one of the most important issue that researchers face during data collection and that may seriously threaten data quality. Nonetheless, this bias remains little-studied. In this paper, the relation between characteristics of the interviewer and response patterns is analysed when risk-attitude is measured. Specifically, we tested if male respondents report higher levels of risk propensity when interviewed by females. Using data from a 2016 cross-sectional survey in Italy on perceived risk of natural disasters, chi-squared test showed a possible effect of interviewers' sex across outcomes, showing that male respondents reported to be more risk prone when interviewed by a female than by a male.