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

ASKING AND RECORDING QUESTIONS 165
Visual aids are difficult for telephone interviewing, but it is possible
to ask respondents to look at their telephone keypads and use
the numbers on the keypad as a rating scale. They can be told that
1 represents the low point on the scale and 8 or 9 the other end of
the scale. A nondigital clock or watch face might be another familiar
graphic form that could be used.
Blanks or Intervals?
Researchers must decide what format of questionnaire they will use.
Although the fill-in-the-blank version is generally preferable, if
interval questions are used, appropriate intervals must be carefully
established. Whereas frequency-related questions might use six categories
(0, 1–2, 3–5, 6–10, 10–20, 20–30), a number of different
intervals could be used (for instance, 0, 1–5, 6–10, 11–15, 16–20,
20–30). As pointed out in Chapter 4 (p.134) it is important to
remember that zero must be its own separate category. It is also
important to have some idea from pretests or other data what the
distribution of frequencies is likely to be. Respondents use the range
of frequencies presented in the response categories to form ideas
about what the researcher believes the distribution to be. There is
abundant evidence that the categories presented to respondents
influence their responses and can alter substantially the frequency
estimates based on the data.
Using Rankings
Sometimes you may be interested in the relative ranking of attributes
or the rank ordering of preferences among different policy positions
rather than in a respondent’s agreement or disagreement with
particular opinions. Rankings are most easily done in written questionnaires,
where respondents can see all the alternatives to be
ranked and can fill in the rankings themselves. It is possible, however,
to rank a small number of items in personal interviews. It is