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

204 ASKING QUESTIONS
state or country or product that the person or company is identified
with. Answering such questions correctly indicates a higher level of
knowledge about that particular person or company than does simple
name recognition.
Question 3 in Figure 6.5, which uses pictures, can be used to
determine knowledge of personalities and other entertainers. Companies
sometimes use this type of question to determine public
familiarity with various product package designs when the brand
name is removed.
At the next level of difficulty are open qualitative questions, as
shown in Figure 6.6, Questions 1 and 3; Figure 6.11, Question 1;
and in the WAIS Similarities Test (see “Measuring Ability” section).
Although these questions vary in difficulty among themselves,
they are, on the average, more difficult than the other types
of questions discussed so far. These questions do not usually offer an
explicit choice or a “don’t know” answer, since successful guessing
is unlikely. Indeed, most respondents who do not know say so rather
than try to guess, since a bad guess may be more embarrassing than
a “don’t know” answer.
Most difficult of all—except for those directed to special informants
such as community informants—are numerical questions or
those dealing with percentages. As we shall note below, efforts to
make numerical questions easier by providing multiple choices
introduce additional problems. The decision on the type of knowledge
questions to use will depend on the researcher’s needs. However,
questions that are either too easy or too difficult will not
discriminate between respondents with different levels of knowledge.
As a general rule, easier knowledge questions are most appropriate
for public issues in their early stages of development; more
difficult questions can be asked about long-standing issues. For example,
knowledge questions about the Arab-Israeli conflict in the
Middle East can be at a higher level of difficulty than questions
about a new national or international crisis.
Similarly, in market research, knowledge questions about
long-established products can be made more difficult than ques-