The Impact of "No Opinion" Response Options on Data Quality: Non-Attitude Reduction or an Invitation to Satisfice?

According to many seasoned survey researchers, offering a no-opinionoption should reduce the pressure to give substantive responsesfelt by respondents who have no true opinions. By contrast,the survey satisficing perspective suggests that no-opinionoptions may discourage some respondents from doing the cognitivework necessary to report the true opinions they do have. Weaddress these arguments using data from nine experiments carriedout in three household surveys. Attraction to no-opinion optionswas found to be greatest among respondents lowest in cognitiveskills (as measured by educational attainment), among respondentsanswering secretly instead of orally, for questions asked laterin a survey, and among respondents who devoted little effortto the reporting process. The quality of attitude reports obtained(as measured by over-time consistency and responsiveness toa question manipulation) was not compromised by the omissionof no-opinion options. These results suggest that inclusionof no-opinion options in attitude measures may not enhance dataquality and instead may preclude measurement of some meaningfulopinions.     

Telephone versus Face-to-Face Interviewing of National Probability Samples with Long Questionnaires: Comparisons of Respondent Satisficing and Social Desirability Response Bias

The last 50 years have seen a gradual replacement of face-to-faceinterviewing with telephone interviewing as the dominant modeof survey data collection in the United States. But some ofthe most expensive and large-scale nationally funded, long-termsurvey research projects involving national area-probabilitysamples and long questionnaires retain face-to-face interviewingas their mode. In this article, we propose two ways in whichshifting such surveys to random digit dialing (RDD) telephoneinterviewing might affect the quality of data acquired, andwe test these hypotheses using data from three national modeexperiments. Random digit dialing telephone respondents weremore likely to satisfice (as evidenced by no-opinion responding,nondifferentiation, and acquiescence), to be less cooperativeand engaged in the interview, and were more likely to expressdissatisfaction with the length of the interview than were face-to-facerespondents, despite the fact that the telephone interviewswere completed more quickly than the face-to-face interviews.Telephone respondents were also more suspicious about the interviewprocess and more likely to present themselves in socially desirableways than were face-to-face respondents. These findings shedlight on the nature of the survey response process, on the costsand benefits associated with particular survey modes, and onthe nature of social interaction generally.     

A Combined Approach to Parental Coping

Summary The development of coping strategies by a combination of behaviourmodification, casework and milieu therapy is discussed withreference to the case of a nine-year-old boy admitted to a childpsychiatric in-patient unit. Admission had been precipitatedby his violent and uncontrollable behaviour at home. The plannedreturn of the child to his family is stressed as an importantpart of the treatment.