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

258 ASKING QUESTIONS
empty cells. In such cases, it is best to group scale steps to embrace
reasonable numbers of respondents. Once the significant relationships
have been found, the problem is to organize and understand
them. Factor analysis is useful at this point.
It has been said that the relationships between psychographics
and preferences for products or behavior are only superficial manifestations
of more basic demographics. Yet two products with very
similar demographic profiles can sometimes turn out to have usefully
different psychographic profiles, and a demographic group in
itself means little unless you have a clear picture of its lifestyle
implications. Although correlations between psychographic variables
and preferences seldom get higher than .3 or .4 (Wells, 1975),
the same is true of the relationships between demographics and
product preference.
Summary
The last twenty years have improved our understanding of consumers
along with our ability to process larger and more complex
amounts of data. As a result, it is increasingly common to use psychographic
questions to segment and profile people based on how
they think and act rather than simply on the basis of demographic
criteria. Although much of the early work on psychographics has
been exploratory and oriented toward specific ad hoc problems or
segmentation efforts, the growing number of studies will help standardize
future efforts.
Using psychographic AIO questions along with behaviorrelated
questions can be a fresh and useful way to better understand
people and why they behave as they do. Essentially, the use of these
questions can help blend an investigation that might be more sociological
and help it also benefit from a psychological vantage point.
Additional Reading
Consumer Profiles: An Introduction to Psychographics (Gunter
and Furnham, 1992)