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

130 ASKING QUESTIONS
Figure 4.3. Behavioral Intentions Can Link
Attitudes and Behaviors.
Attitude
Behavioral
Intentions
• Likelihood
• Frequency
Behavior
Similarly, one’s attitude toward exercising and eating less might be
related to the intention to “lose ten pounds before my high school
reunion,” and this intention is likely to be related to actual weight
loss. Although a number of other factors make these relationships
imperfect, it is often believed there is a general mapping from one’s
attitude to behavioral intentions.
One important reason for measuring behavioral intentions (instead
of just attitudes) is that behavioral intentions can help differentiate
between people who choose an endpoint on a scale. For
instance, if two people really like a product and rate it as a 9 on a
9-point scale, there is no way to determine whether one plans to
consume the product three times or thirty times within the next year.
Behavioral intention questions can be used to estimate how
likely one is to perform a behavior (buy a car in the next year, or
donate money to a presidential candidate’s campaign). They can
also be used to estimate how frequently one is likely to perform a
behavior (exercise in the next year, call long distance in the next
month), and so forth. Both are of interest in a number of cases. In
this section we will discuss how and when it is important to ask one
type of question versus the other.
Asking Likelihood Questions Regarding Incidence
“Do you plan on buying a new car in the next year?” This is an incidence
question that does not focus on how many cars that person
will purchase in the next year, but instead focuses on how likely the
respondent is to buy a car. The two most common types of behav-