This study examines a key issue in spiral of silence research: whether the realism of the setting in which respondents are asked to express opinions affects their willingness to do so. Some reviews of spiral of silence theory have argued that survey measures do not capture the effect adequately because respondents see them as too hypothetical. In this study, we use a split-ballot technique to compare two closely related ways of assessing willingness to express opinions. One method is a standard question that asks respondents whether they would, hypothetically, be willing to express an opinion in a given social situation. The other method asks respondents whether they would be willing to participate in a focus group. As hypothesized, we found that respondents asked to participate in the focus group were less willing to express opinions; also, their willingness was more highly related to independent variables typically used in spiral of silence research, such as fear of isolation and perceptions of public opinion climates.
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