If you have ever been called to participate in a phone survey, you probably know the routine where you hear a question and then jump in with an answer. A good interviewer will remind you that she needs to read the entire question and all the answer options just to be sure that you offered…
I was the kid who skipped recess to help grade quizzes; the graduate student who delayed getting a degree because it meant the end of school; the professor who told students that he was now in the 33rd grade and still loved school. Even now I can’t resist reviewing great opportunities for more coursework and…
It is good to use multiple survey questions to measure a particular attitude or opinion, and for many years experts on survey design recommended reversing the wording on some questions to get a stronger and more valid measure. For example, if we want to measure retirement confidence we might ask respondents how much they agree…
If you ever feel like strangling the next research consultant who promises to deliver “actionable insights” then you can join me and the Dilbert team in making fun of it instead. Not only is it a horrid phrase, but it is unfortunately meaningless now that every research firm claims to be different from others by…
Fifteen years ago the U.S. Census Bureau removed “Hispanic” from its question about race and instead created a stand-alone question to assess Hispanic ethnicity. It’s the reason we often advise our clients to ask about race and ethnicity separately, using questions similar to the Census Bureau’s, which are shown in Figure 1. Well, chances are…
During a presidential election year there is no escaping the flurry of public opinion polling and the intense scrutiny that surveys get from the media. But love it or hate it, there are excellent reasons to pay close attention to this year’s political polling.
Way back in 1944, Edwards Deming published an article in the American Sociological Review that could be required reading for anybody who does research today. He outlined all potential (and unfortunately, common) sources of error in survey research. Apparently our contemporary obsession with sample sizes, random samples, response rates, and margins of error is not…
In a typical graduate-level research course on survey methods, students are taught to ask demographic questions about race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, etc. at the end of a survey. The questions are typically off-topic, and they sometimes scare away respondents who feel such questions are intrusive. But with most surveys now fielded through online survey…
A colleague at the University of Chicago is planning to teach a summer course on survey methods in North Korea. He asked a large group of researchers who belong to AAPOR (the American Association of Public Opinion Research) for recommendations on 10 books to bring that he could leave in the library. We get similar…
It is hard to resist the temptation of asking “just one more question” when you’ve got an engaged respondent answering your survey questions online or on the phone. But it is crucial to do so because plenty of research shows that longer surveys result in bad data. Survey respondents may be willing to answer just…