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

208 ASKING QUESTIONS
answers, most respondents will guess and choose an answer somewhat
near the middle. For this reason, Payne (1951) suggested that
the correct answer be put at the top or bottom of the list of alternatives.
Respondents, however, can be misled by this. We believe that
an even better procedure is not to offer alternatives to the respondent
but to make such questions open-ended. There is no difficulty
in coding such responses since the data are numerical and can easily
be processed without additional coding. The open question is
more likely to elicit a “don’t know” response than the closed questions,
but respondents who do volunteer an answer or guess will be
indicating knowledge or attitudes that are not distorted by the question
stimulus.
Using Key Informants
Using key informants in social science is widespread in studies of
community power and influence, community decision making and
innovation, collective behavior, and the ecology of local institutions.
Key informants can provide information that is not currently
available from census data or other published sources. Although
key informants are usually better informed than the general public,
they cannot be expected to know everything. Information
informants provide may be distorted by their attitudes or roles in
the community.
As an illustration in a study of what they called “community
informants,” Houston and Sudman (1975) reported that church
informants mentioned a higher number of churches in the neighborhood
than did other informants and the community organization
informants mentioned more community organizations. These
unsurprising results are a function not only of the greater expertise
in their areas of specialization but also of somewhat different perspectives.
Thus, the church informants tended to define a neighborhood’s
boundaries in terms of parish boundaries or of church
attendance patterns, the school informants used school boundaries,
and so on.