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

104 ASKING QUESTIONS
This applies to attitude and knowledge questions as well as behavior.
Thus, some of the daily drinkers would choose a response more
in the middle, thereby causing a substantial understatement.
An alternative explanation is that the open-ended questions
allow the really heavy drinkers to state numbers that exceed the
highest precodes. When researchers set precodes, they tend to set
the highest value at a level that will still have fairly high frequencies.
If the tail of a distribution is long, the highest precode category
does not capture the really heavy drinkers. For more discussion of
open questions, see Bradburn, Sudman, and Associates, 1979,
Chapter Two.
There is one occasion when asking a closed-ended question
may be desirable. This is when one is interested in learning whether
the respondent has ever done what some might consider a socially
undesirable act, such as masturbation, in the past month. Asking a
closed frequency question such as Question 4 in Figure 3.9 may suggest
to respondents that masturbation is widely practiced and that
an answer at the lower end of the scale would not shock anyone.
Use Long Questions with Familiar Words
The advantages and possible disadvantages of longer questions
about nonthreatening behavior were discussed in Chapter Two, and
that discussion need not be repeated. When questions are asked
about the frequency of socially undesirable behavior, overreporting
is not a problem with most segments, and longer questions help
relieve the tendency to underreport. It is important to use these
longer questions to try to provide additional cues to memory. Thus,
Question 3 in Figure 3.8 begins by pointing out the popularity of
beer and wine and listing examples of their uses.
Longer questions increased the reported activities of socially undesirable
behavior by about 25 to 30 percent, as compared with the
standard short questions. Longer questions, however, had no effect
on respondents’ willingness to report ever engaging in socially unde-