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

252 ASKING QUESTIONS
Seven Steps to Generating Psychographic Questions
When conducting psychographic research, one can either begin
with a large, highly diversified collection of statements (a “shotgun”
approach) or a more limited number of multi-item scales that focus
on specific, well-identified psychological constructs.
Some notable researchers (Wells, 1975) prefer the more exploratory
shotgun approach because of its ability to generate novel,
unexpected, and potentially interesting or useful relationships.
Using a limited number of multi-item scales reduces the range of
topics researchers can cover and often prevents respondents from
generating insightful observations. Although the latitude afforded
by the shotgun approach can provide some tempting and interesting
findings, ultimately the more idiosyncratic these measures are,
the more difficult it is to justify any interesting findings related to
them. Discoveries obtained with idiosyncratic measures are also
more difficult to replicate.
With this caveat in mind, how would you go about generating
and isolating psychographic or individual difference variables that
might be interesting for a particular project? The approach is similar
to the general steps you use in formulating questions described
in earlier chapters.
1. Scan the literature. Look for constructs that might be mentioned
(even parenthetically) as containing characteristics that
influence attitudes or behaviors in the domain in which you are
interested. This literature can be academic or popular.
2. Talk to relevant experts in this area. These may be researchers,
salespeople, consumers, or what we simply call “inside sources”—
that is, those people whose expertise is based on their frequent
interaction with the people you are interested in. For instance, a
study attempting to understand (and deter) binge drinking interviewed
bartenders to try to develop personality profiles of those
most predisposed to binge drinking. Similarly, a study of men who