Here - Tilburg University

Presenter
Züll, Cornelia & Scholz, Evi; Gesis – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences,
Germany
Authors
Cornelia Züll & Evi Scholz
Title
Item Nonresponse in Open Ended Questions: Empirical Analyses of Respondents’
Answering Behaviour on the Meaning of Left and Right.
Abstract
One of the main topics of the German Social Survey (ALLBUS) in 2008
was “political attitudes and political participation”. As in many other political
science based surveys the self-placement on a left-right scale was asked as an
indicator for ideological self-identification. Though left-right self-placement is
one of the most frequently used measures in empirical political science research,
the respondents' associations with “left” and “right” are queried only rarely in
the last decades of survey research. ALLBUS 2008 included two open-ended
questions directly following the left-right scale itself and thus allows to gain
important insights in how respondents use the left-right scale: “What do you
mean by left/right”. However, item non-response on these open-ended questions
has to be well considered before the associations with “left” and “right” are
analyzed and results are interpreted. About 20% of the respondents answered
“don’t know” or did not answer the question at all. Such a considerable amount
of non-response might have effects on data quality and, hence, on the
interpretation of the results. We assume that respondents answering “don’t
know” or those who did not give any answer would have problems with the self-
placement on the left-right scale. We further assume that demographic and
political indicators, i.e. education – both formally and politically – or political
interest, influence the non-response behavior. We will present the results of our
investigation of item non-response on the questions about associations with
left/right and discuss quality problems related to the validity of the left-right
scale itself.