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

ASKING THREATENING QUESTIONS ABOUT BEHAVIOR 105
sirable activity, such as drinking liquor or getting drunk (Bradburn,
Sudman, and Associates, 1979).
Some critics of survey research procedures claim that using
standardized wordings makes the interview situation artificial. They
claim that such stilted wording makes it more difficult for some
respondents to understand the question and provide truthful responses
and that slang would be easier for most respondents to
understand. Furthermore, these people contend that slang and colloquialisms
are often used in normal conversation when the behavior
being discussed is socially undesirable and thus are appropriate
for questions regarding such behavior.
In contrast to this position, other researchers are concerned
that using slang and varying the question wording from respondent
to respondent introduces uncontrolled method variability. This
problem is greatest with attitude questions where answers clearly
depend on how the question is asked, but less critical for behavior
questions where understanding the question is most important.
Still, how the behavior question is asked may significantly affect
how threatening it is perceived to be.
One approach that reduces the threat is to have the respondent
(not the interviewer) make the decision on the word to use, when
the standard words such as “liquor” or “sexual intercourse” may be
too formal. In our research, we learned that most respondents preferred
the term “love making” to “sexual intercourse,” and some
used even more direct colloquialisms. For liquor, many respondents
used words such as “booze.” The interviewer would then use the
respondents’ words. This is easy to do in computer-assisted interviewing
where once the word is typed into the computer by the
interviewer it can be programmed to appear in subsequent questions.
For example, Question 4A in Figure 3.8 would ask “When
you drank booze, on the average how often did you drink it?” The
use of familiar words increased the reported frequencies of socially
undesirable behavior about 15 percent, as compared to the use of
standard wording (Bradburn, Sudman, and Associates, 1979).