SURVEY QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FREQUENCY OF VAGUELY DEFINED EVENTS: THE EFFECTS OF RESPONSE ALTERNATIVES |
| |
| Authors: | GASKELL GEORGE D; O'MUIRCHEARTAIGH COLM A; WRIGHT DANIEL B |
| |
| Institution: | GEORGE D. GASKELL is senior lecturer, Department of Social Psychology, London School of Economics, COLM A. O'MUKCHEARTAIGH is senior lecturer in the Department of Statistics, London School of Economics, DANIEL B. WRIGHT is research officer, Department of Social Psychology, London School of Economics. All three are members of the interdisciplinary Cognitive Survey Laboratory. An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Conference of Social Science Methodology, Trento, Italy, June 22–26, 1992. This research was supported by grants from Suntory Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). We wish to thank the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) for allowing us access to their omnibus survey and Maggie Murphy for helpful comments throughout this research. Correspondence should be addressed to George D. Gaskell, Social Psychology Department, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, England. |
| |
| Abstract: | Experimental research has shown that the choice of responsealternatives can influence responses to questions about thefrequency of vaguely defined target events (e.g., feeling annoyed);the set of response alternatives is treated as information thatcontributes to the interpretation of the question. In a seriesof split ballot experiments we investigate whether such effectsoccur in a large-scale survey context for sets of response alternativesthat might be used interchangeably by survey researchers. Thepredicted response shifts were found in our field experiments.Those presented with response alternatives discriminating atlow frequencies reported fewer of the target episodes than thosepresented with higher-frequency response alternatives. However,the size of the observed shifts varied from zero to 13 percentand depended on a number of characteristics of the survey, forexample, the presence of "priming" questions and the orientationof the response scales. Response alternatives are not neutraland therefore must be carefully considered when constructinga survey question. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
| 本文献已被 Oxford 等数据库收录！ |
|
