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

26 ASKING QUESTIONS
This search for existing questions sometimes becomes tedious
and time-consuming, but it is time well spent. Even if you ultimately
use only a few existing questions, the search generally helps
you sharpen the research question and improve the quality of the
new questions that you write.
Consider the following caveats when adapting questions from
other sources. Very small changes in wording or in the response
categories offered can result in large differences in results. Within a
year of each other, three polls (see Figure 1.1) asked representative
samples of Americans about who they believed to be the greatest
male athlete of the twentieth century (closed-ended), the greatest
male or female athlete living at any point in the twentieth century
(open-ended), and the greatest active athlete in the world of
sports today (open-ended). Although all were taken within one year
of each other, there is very little correspondence between the three.
This underscores the importance of making certain any questions
that are borrowed or replicated from another source specifically identify
the issue that is of primary interest to your research question.
Sources of Error in Responses
Since questionnaires are designed to elicit information from respondents,
the quality of a question can be measured by the degree to
which it elicits the information that the researcher desires. This criterion
is called validity. Directly measuring the validity of questions
is often difficult and depends on the nature of the question.
Different Types of Questions Have Different Errors
We find it useful to divide questions into the following three groups:
(1) those that ask about behavior or facts, (2) those that ask about
knowledge, and (3) those that ask about psychological states or attitudes.
Behavioral or factual questions ask about characteristics
of people, things people have done, or things that have happened