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

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Chapter Five<br />

<strong>Asking</strong> and Recording<br />

Open-Ended and<br />

Closed-Ended <strong>Questions</strong><br />

Previously we discussed a number of issues pertaining to the formulation<br />

of questions about attitude or opinions. This chapter is<br />

concerned with techniques for recording answers to questions. <strong>To</strong><br />

some extent, the distinction between question formulation and<br />

techniques for recording answers is an artificial one, because the<br />

form of the question often dictates the most appropriate technique<br />

for recording the answer—that is, some questions take on their<br />

meaning by their response categories. For example, the question<br />

used for many years in the Current Population Survey to measure<br />

employment status was “What were you doing most of last week?”<br />

<strong>The</strong> question only became meaningful when the response categories<br />

were incorporated into the question: “What were you doing<br />

most of last week—working, keeping house, going to school, or<br />

something else?”<br />

Of course, many of the examples given in the previous chapter<br />

also specified the answer categories. However, a number of additional<br />

critical issues and options regarding response formats exist,<br />

and we believe they justify their own chapter. Although we cannot<br />

hope to cover every possible form of response format that has been<br />

used in survey research, we shall mention the principal variations<br />

and highlight a few valuable response formats we believe are underutilized<br />

in current practice.<br />

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