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

Chapter Eight
Asking Psychographic Questions
Psychographic and “lifestyle” research are sometimes referred to as
activities, interests, and opinions (AIO) research because the questions
often focus on these types of questions. This research resembles
both motivation research and conventional research. It
resembles motivation research because a major aim is to draw recognizably
human portraits of consumers, but it also resembles more
conventional research in that these portraits can be analyzed with
standard statistical tools.
Our understanding of human behavior has evolved from viewing
humans as an undifferentiated, homogenous population (“People
think . . .”) to viewing them on a more demographic basis (“So,
what do women think about the new president?” or “What do the
French think about biotechnology?”). Although this evolution represented
some improvement in the accuracy and specificity of survey
results, it is still difficult to predict human behavior, even when
people are grouped by demographic characteristics. For instance,
why is it that two neighbors with similar backgrounds, incomes, and
educations can have different political beliefs, different types of
cars, and different preferences for foods?
Psychographic and individual difference measures enable us to
further segment populations to explain why different people behave
in different ways. When the term psychographics was introduced
by Emanuel Demby in the 1960s, it was generally defined as “the
use of psychological, sociological, and anthropological factors, selfconcept,
and lifestyle to determine how the market is segmented by
the propensity of groups within the market—and their reasons—to
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