The Importance of the Written and Spoken Word

In school we were told that the construction of survey questions is very important. We're told to focus the questions, make them as brief and clear as possible. And while there isn't a ton of emphasis put on the actual words you're using (other than to say that you must use words that most people would be able to define) the results of this survey by New York Times/CBS shows researchers that they might want to pay a little more attention to word selection. You see, the approval for allowing gay or homosexual people to serve in the military depends on what you call them. The poll found that 70 percent of those polled favor (either strongly favor or somewhat favor) allowing gay men and lesbians to serve in the military while only 59 percent of respondents favor (either strongly favor or somewhat favor) allowing homosexuals to serve in the military.




I heard Michelangelo Signorile posit that the numbers could be lower because the word "homosexual" mentions the word sex and makes respondents think about sex between two men (because that presumably is where the mind goes for images of repulsion, rather than lesbian sex). I'm not so sure that I completely agree with his argument, but what I think the real takeaway for researchers as well as people in general is that words matter. We have to be a lot more careful about the words we use in order to clearly convey what we really want to say. Some people brush things off as being purely about semantics, but as this poll shows, it's not just semantics, some words truly rub people the wrong way and cause them to react more negatively.