The Analysis of Survey Data with Framing Effects

A well-known difficulty in survey research is that respondents’ answers to questions can depend on arbitrary features of a survey’s design, such as the wording of questions or the ordering of answer choices. In this paper, we describe a novel set of tools for analyzing survey data characterized by such framing effects. We show that the conventional approach to analyzing data with framing effects—randomizing survey-takers across frames and pooling the responses—generally does not identify a useful parameter. In its place, we propose an alternative approach and provide conditions under which it identifies the responses that are unaffected by framing. We also present several results for shedding light on the population distribution of the individual characteristic the survey is designed to measure.