 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Respondent" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(March 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Arespondent is a person who is called upon to issue a response to a communication made by another. The term is used in legal contexts, insurvey methodology, and in psychological conditioning.
Inlegal usage, this term specifically refers to thedefendant in alegal proceeding commenced by a petitioner, and also to anappellee, or the opposing party, in anappeal 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.[1]
In theUnited States Senate, the two sides in animpeachment trial are called the management and the respondent.
Inpsychology, respondent conditioning is a synonym forclassical conditioning orPavlovian conditioning. Respondent behavior specifically refers to the behavior consistently elicited by a reflexive or classically conditioned stimulus.
Inpopulation survey andquestionnaire pretesting, a respondent is aresearch participant replying with answers or feedback to a survey.[2][3] 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.
In non-legal or informal usage, the term refers to one who refutes or responds to a thesis or an argument. Incross-cultural communication, the second person responding to the meaning or message from an original source which has beencontextualised or decoded for the understanding of respondents asrecipients or hearers of the message occurring from a different cultural context.