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Javeline, D. (1999). Response effects in polite cultures: A test of acquiescence in Kazakhstan. Public Opinion Quarterly 63: 1-28. This article had an interesting discussion of the cultural predisposition to agree to attitudinal statements in survey research. This effect has been found in various Asian cultures. This article examines the problem in Kazakhstan with a controlled experiment testing responses to positive statements, negative statements, and balanced statements (that offered two positional choices). The author found that agreement to positive and negative versions of a statement were not equally flipped (e.g., it was not true that if X% agreed with the positive statement that X% disagreed with the negative statement). This suggested that positive or negative statements were not reliable because of this bias. The balanced statements had less difference in the responses from positive or negative than the positive/negative had with each other. The author also discovered differences in acquiescence between Russians and Kazakhs. Although differences were detected between ethnicities without consideration of question format, when question format was put into the analysis, the differences between ethnicity were strengthened on 4 measures and weakened on 2.