PROBING "DONT KNOW" ANSWERS: EFFECTS ON SURVEY ESTIMATES AND VARIABLE RELATIONSHIPS |
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| Authors: | SANCHEZ MARIA ELENA; MORCHIO GIOVANNA |
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| Institution: | MARIA ELENA SANCHEZ is a survey methodologist at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, U.S. Public Health Service, GIOVANNA MORCHIO is a research associate at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. We wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of an anonymous reviewer and the assistance of Pedro P. Sanchez, who strayed willingly and far from his professional endeavors to review interviews and identify questions probed by interviewers. |
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| Abstract: | Don't Know responses to survey questions are ambiguous becausethe same words are used by respondents to mean different things—ignorance,indecision, or uncertainty about the meaning of the questionasked. In order to clarify the meaning of such answers, surveyinterviewers are frequently trained to probe Don't Know answersat least once before the answer is considered final. We arguethat unconditional probing of Don't Know answers may not bea desirable practice, particularly as regards knowledge items.Large unintended effects on responses to four knowledge itemsresulted when two groups of interviewers, who administered thesame survey questions, probed Don't Know responses at differentrates. Strong evidence is provided in the article that the probingof Don't Know answers encouraged guesswork on the part of uninformedrespondents, giving rise to significant distributional differencesand differences in means across half samples for the affectedvariables. However, relationships between variables appear tobe largely unaffected by probing effects. In order to formulatevalid probing guidelines for interviewer training, further researchis needed to establish whether the findings for knowledge questionsgeneralize to factual questions. |
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