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

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ASKING THREATENING QUESTIONS ABOUT BEHAVIOR 107<br />

over time and becomes routine. Respondents who might initially<br />

hesitate to report purchasing beer or contraceptives become less inhibited<br />

as time goes by.<br />

Second, with repeated exposure, respondents gradually gain<br />

confidence in the organization or researcher gathering the data.<br />

Over time, respondents get a better understanding that the data<br />

are gathered to be used in aggregate form and that there are no personal<br />

consequences of reporting any kinds of behavior. <strong>The</strong> evidence<br />

suggests that confidence in the research and the perceived<br />

threat of the questions both level off fairly rapidly after two or<br />

three diaries or interviews. This is fortunate, since otherwise substantive<br />

data on trends would be confounded with response effects<br />

(Ferber, 1966).<br />

Finally, diaries embed some threatening topics into a more general<br />

framework to avoid conditioning. Such embedding also appears<br />

to be effective for reducing threat. For example, respondents who<br />

reported health expenditures in a diary (Sudman and Lannom,<br />

1980) reported higher levels of expenditures for contraceptives<br />

than did respondents who were interviewed several times. <strong>The</strong><br />

diaries here seem to be having the same effect as anonymous forms.<br />

Embed the Question<br />

<strong>The</strong> threat of a question is partially determined by the context in<br />

which it is asked. If more threatening topics have been asked about<br />

earlier, a particular question may appear less threatening than if it<br />

had been asked first. Yet there are limitations to the use of this procedure.<br />

As we shall see in Chapter Ten, you would not want to start<br />

with very threatening questions since this could reduce respondent<br />

cooperation during the rest of the questionnaire. Also, putting the<br />

most threatening behavior question first will probably make the<br />

underreporting on that question even worse. Suppose, however, you<br />

were interested only in beer drinking. <strong>The</strong>n you would ask an early<br />

question about liquor drinking to reduce the threat of the beer

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