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

ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS 139
items in which respondents reported themselves as either “excited”
or “bored,” “cheerful” or “depressed,” “happy” or “unhappy,” and so
on, questions were phrased in a unipolar manner. Respondents were
asked in separate questions whether they had felt, for example, “on
top of the world” or “depressed” during the past few weeks. Respondents
answered each question “yes” or “no.” A surprising finding
was that, although responses to the positively worded questions correlated
with one another, and the negatively worded items correlated
with one another, responses to the positive items had a zero
relationship to responses to the negative items. Thus the concept
of psychological well-being turned out to be multidimensional. Although
unipolar items will often produce results similar to those
found with bipolar items, bipolar items make it difficult to discover
interesting independence of dimensions.
Using Question Filters
Questions about complex attitudes sometimes need to be broken
down into a series of simpler unipolar questions. The particular
questions to be asked may be contingent on answers to previous
questions. This technique is called filtering or branching. It is
a useful technique to decompose complex attitudes so that you
do not have to use difficult multidimensional questions that require
a number of qualifying clauses.
A good example of the use of filters come from an adaptation of
a question about the first Gulf War, shown in Figure 4.4. The question
was designed to be asked about three months before the start of
the war to measure public opinion about support of a war with Iraq.
Note that there is a question that is asked of respondents who gave
a response to the previous question that needed elaboration in order
to get at the various conditions and dates that were being discussed
as policy options at the time.
Sometimes the use of filters produces some surprising results. For
instance, the use of filters with this question gives a different view of
public opinion than would be obtained if you only used the first