Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

ASKING THREATENING QUESTIONS ABOUT BEHAVIOR 103
to use when researching behavior such as abortion and bankruptcies,
where the respondent may not personally be ashamed of the
action but may not know how the behavior is viewed by the interviewer.
Aside from the issue of reporting quality, some readers may
wonder whether procedures such as randomized response and card
sorting have any negative effects on respondent cooperation by disrupting
the flow of the interview. All evidence indicates that quite
the contrary is the case. Both respondents and interviewers enjoy
card sorting exercises or shaking a box of beads. Interviewers report
that respondent cooperation improves when there is some variety
in the tasks.
Use Open-Ended Questions
As a general rule survey researchers prefer closed questions because
they are easier to process and they reduce coder variability. (See
Chapter Five.) In attempting to obtain frequencies of threatening
behavior, however, there is no difficulty in coding, since the answer
is numeric. For example, Question 2A in Figure 3.8 asks how often
the respondent drank beer and allows for such answers as “Daily,”
“Several times a week,” “Weekly,” “Monthly,” and so on. All these
answers can be converted to number of days per month or year.
It may not be obvious why the open-ended question here is
superior to a closed-ended question that puts possible alternatives
on a card and asks the respondent to select one. One reason is that
the closed question must arrange the alternatives in a logical
sequence, from most frequent to least frequent, or the reverse. In
either case, the most extreme answer, “Daily,” would be either at
the extreme top or bottom of a list provided on a card. Heavy
drinkers who drank beer daily would need to select the extreme
response if they reported correctly. There is, however, a general tendency
for respondents to avoid extreme answers and to prefer an
answer in the middle of a list because it is thought to indicate those
values that the researcher thinks are most likely in the population.