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

ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS 133
being approached by a friend’s daughter (Question 2) than when
the person doing the selling is not specified in the question. The significant
difference between these two answers was used to underscore
how important face-to-face sales were to the success of cookie
sale efforts.
Asking Frequency-Related Questions Regarding
Future Behavior
A second way to ask questions of behavioral intentions is to ask
people to estimate how many times they will engage in the behavior
within a specified period of time. This approach is particularly
useful when investigating frequent behaviors. Typically questions
are asked as either a fill-in-the-blank question or as a frequency
question with fixed intervals. Consider these two questions asked
after the BSE crisis with beef in Europe.
1. How many times will you eat beef for your evening meal in the
next month?
times in the next month
2. How many times will you eat beef for your evening meal in the
next month?
0 1–2 3–5 6–10 11–20 21–30
The first type of question, the fill-in-the-blank question, offers
a response mode that is free of range biases, interval biases, or
anchoring effects. Despite these advantages, it is often less frequently
used than the interval question (Question 2) because it
provides more possibility for data entry error than does a checked
box. It is also a favorite in electronic surveys. Although the fill-inthe-blank
version is generally preferable, if the interval question is
to be used, appropriate intervals must be carefully considered.
Although Question 2 above used six categories (0, 1–2, 3–5, 6–10,
11–20, 21–30), there are a wide variety of other numerical intervals