A respondent is a person who is called upon to issue a response to a communication made by another. The term is used in legal contexts, in

survey methodology Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey d ...

, and in psychological conditioning.

Legal usage

In legal usage, this term specifically refers to the

defendant In court proceedings, a defendant is a person or object who is the party either accused of committing a crime in criminal prosecution or against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case. Terminology varies from one juris ...

in a

legal proceeding Legal proceeding is an activity that seeks to invoke the power of a tribunal in order to enforce a law. Although the term may be defined more broadly or more narrowly as circumstances require, it has been noted that " e term ''legal proceedings ...

commenced by a petitioner, and also to an appellee, or the opposing party, in an

appeal In law, an appeal is the process in which Legal case, cases are reviewed by a higher authority, where parties request a formal change to an official decision. Appeals function both as a process for error correction as well as a process of cla ...

from a decision by an initial fact-finder or tribunal. For example in a Court of Appeal case, the respondents are the party facing the appellant, who is challenging a lower court decision or some aspect of it. The respondent may have been the "claimant" or the "defendant" in the lower court. In the

United States Senate The United States Senate is a chamber of the Bicameralism, bicameral United States Congress; it is the upper house, with the United States House of Representatives, U.S. House of Representatives being the lower house. Together, the Senate and ...

, the two sides in an impeachment trial are called the management and the respondent.

Psychology usage

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

, respondent conditioning is a synonym for

classical conditioning Classical conditioning (also respondent conditioning and Pavlovian conditioning) is a behavioral procedure in which a biologically potent Stimulus (physiology), stimulus (e.g. food, a puff of air on the eye, a potential rival) is paired with a n ...

or Pavlovian conditioning. Respondent behavior specifically refers to the behavior consistently elicited by a reflexive or classically conditioned stimulus.

Survey usage

In population survey and questionnaire pretesting, a respondent is a research participant replying with answers or feedback to a survey. Depending on the survey questions and context, respondent answers may represent themselves as individuals, a household or organization of which they are a part, or as a proxy to another individual.

Other usages

In non-legal or informal usage, the term refers to one who refutes or responds to a thesis or an argument. In

cross-cultural communication Cross-cultural communication is a field of study investigating how people from differing culture, cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communication, communicate across cultures ...

, the second person responding to the meaning or message from an original source which has been contextualised or decoded for the understanding of respondents as ''recipients or hearers'' of the message occurring from a different cultural context.

References

{{Reflist Civil law legal terminology Survey methodology Psychology experiments American legal terminology