Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

272 Chapter 10
Most people can’t recall with any acceptable accuracy how long they spent
in the hospital last year, how many miles they drive each week, or how much
they’ve cut back on their use of air-conditioning. They can recall whether they
own a television, have ever been to Cairo, or voted in the recent elections. And
they can tell you whether they think they got a fair price for the land they
vacated when the dam was built or believe the local member of parliament is
doing a better job than her predecessor at giving equal time to rich people and
poor people who come to her with complaints.
4. Make sure there’s a clear purpose for every question you ask in a survey. When
I say ‘‘clear purpose,’’ I mean clear to respondents, not just to you. And once
you’re on a topic, stay on it and finish it. Respondents can get frustrated, confused,
and annoyed at the tactic of switching topics and then coming back to a
topic that they’ve already dealt with on a questionnaire. Some researchers do
exactly this just to ask the same question in more than one way and to check
respondent reliability. This underestimates the intelligence of respondents and is
asking for trouble—I have known respondents to sabotage questionnaires that
they found insulting to their intelligence.
You can (and should) ask questions that are related to one another at different
places in a questionnaire, so long as each question makes sense in terms
of its placement in the overall instrument. For example, if you are interviewing
labor migrants, you’ll probably want to get a labor history—by asking where
the respondent has worked during the past few years. Later, in a section on
family economics, you might ask whether a respondent has ever sent remittances
and from where.
As you move from one topic to another, put in a transition paragraph that
makes each shift logical to the respondent. For example, you might say: ‘‘Now
that we have learned something about the kinds of food you like, we’d like to
know about. . . .’’ The exact wording of these transition paragraphs should be
varied throughout a questionnaire.
5. Pay careful attention to contingencies and filter questions. Many question topics
contain several contingencies. Suppose you ask someone if they are married. If
they answer ‘‘no,’’ then you probably want to ask whether they’ve ever been married.
You may want to know whether they have children, irrespective of whether
they are married or have ever been married. You may want to know what people
think is the ideal family size, irrespective of whether they’ve been married, plan
to be married, have children, or plan to have children.
You can see that the contingencies can get very complex. The best way to
ensure that all contingencies are accounted for is to build a contingency flow
chart like that shown in figure 10.3 (Sirken 1972; Sudman and Bradburn
1982).