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

186 ASKING QUESTIONS
question. Another procedure for obtaining knowledge of public figures
is to show their photographs and ask respondents for their
names, as in Question 3. This question is even more difficult than
asking who the respondent is or what he does.
This illustration is important in that it shows how different levels
of knowledge and relationships can be tapped through these
different efforts. If name recognition were higher than face recognition,
it might indicate that candidate issues were more salient and
associated with his or her name than with a photo. If only the
photo were salient, it might mean the opposite—that the face is
familiar but the issues are not. As with the authors example in Figure
6.4, it might be important to break these statistics out by education,
age, or past voting participation before commenting on or
determining campaign strategies.
Health Knowledge
For health policy purposes and health information campaigns, it is
important to know what the public knows about various health
issues. Figure 6.6 gives a series of health knowledge questions. Questions
1 through 4 are from a study conducted by the University of
Illinois Survey Research Laboratory to provide guidance for a cancer
information campaign. The remaining questions are from various
Gallup surveys (1985, 1987). Note that although these are all
knowledge questions, several are couched as opinion questions to
reduce threat.
As was underscored in Chapter Three, care must be taken
when asking threatening questions about behavior. This instance
shows that techniques used to reduce the threat of behavior-related
questions can also be used to ask about potentially threatening
knowledge-related questions. This can particularly be the issue
when appearing to know too much about a topic (such as drugs or
promiscuous sexual behavior) might imply a suspiciously high level
of familiarity.