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

160 ASKING QUESTIONS
computer-assisted interviewing or Web surveys, the answers are
recorded electronically when the interviewer or respondent selects
them.
Constructing Response Categories
The wording and number of response categories can influence
responses. Consider these two examples:
Compared with American families in general, would you
say your family income is far below average, below average,
average, above average, or far above average? (Probe) Just
your best guess.
Compared with American families in general, would you
say your family income is poor, fair, good, or excellent?
There are three points about these examples that have general
application to the construction of response categories. The first is
that the five categories in the first question are about the maximum
number that respondents can understand without the help of visual
aids. Even five categories stretch the respondents’ abilities to keep
the whole scale in mind at once. In this instance, however, respondents
are able to anchor the scale with two categories above and
two below “average,” and thus they do not have to pay too much
attention to the actual words. When you are using a simple verbal
rating scale in which each term is different, as in the second question,
the scale should include no more than four items unless the
items appear on a printed list given to respondents.
Second, note that the two questions are quite different. The
first invokes the notion of average income, which is a number that
may or may not be known to respondents. Although the question
is clearly intended to ask about the respondents’ perceptions of their
relative incomes rather than actual calculations, still, to an
unknown degree, respondents will have more or less accurate infor-