Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

274 Chapter 10
Strongly Disapprove, rather than Approve, Neutral, Disapprove. This will give
people the opportunity to make finer-grained choices. If your sample is large
enough, you can distinguish during analysis among respondents who answer,
say, ‘‘strongly approve’’ vs. ‘‘approve’’ on some item.
For smaller samples, you’ll have to aggregate the data into three categories
for analysis. Self-administered questionnaires allow the use of 7-point scales,
like the semantic differential scale shown in figure 10.4, and even longer
scales. Telephone interviews usually require 3-point scales.
GUN CONTROL
Difficult Easy
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Good Bad
Ethical
Corrupt
Important Trivial
Figure 10.4. A 7-point semantic differential scale.
Notice that the semantic differential scale in figure 10.4 has word anchors
at both ends and numbers in the middle, not words. In this kind of scale, we
want to let people interpret the dimension indicated by the anchors. In typical
rating scales (you know, the 3- and 5-point scales you see in questionnaires),
we want to remove ambiguity, so we label all the points in words—like
Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree (Peters and
McCormick 1966. Much more on how to construct scales in chapter 12.)
7. Try to package questions in self-administered questionnaires, as shown earlier
in figure 10.1. This is a way to get a lot of data quickly and easily, and, if done
properly, it will prevent respondents from getting bored with a survey. For example,
you might say ‘‘Please indicate how close you feel to each of the persons on
this chart’’ and provide the respondent with a list of relatives (mother, father,
sister, brother, etc.) and a scale (very close, close, neutral, distant, very distant,
etc.).
Be sure to make scales unambiguous. If you are asking how often people
think they do something, don’t say ‘‘regularly’’ when you mean ‘‘more than