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- Title
Non-Experimental Research on the Effects of the Wording of Questions in Survey Interviews.
- Authors
Molenaar, Nicolaas J.
- Abstract
In handbooks concerning the interview as a technique of data collection advice is often found concerning how to formulate questions and where to place them in a questionnaire. Such advice is obviously based on the assumption that the wording and the position of questions may have effects on the answers of respondents. Since 1940 many investigations have been carried out to test this assumption, and in many cases the effects of wording and position were indeed shown to be present. The purpose of the paper is neither to discuss these investigations substantively nor to construct some substantive theory in which their results could be integrated, however valuable such an undertaking would be at the moment. The main character of the paper is, rather, methodological. The design commonly used in investigations of the effects of the wording of questions is the "split-ballot" experiment. In the paper more efficient method is proposed and demonstrated: a non-experimental design that makes use of existing material. The method attempts to overcome the practical limitations of the traditional experimental design while detecting eventual systematic in the effects of many wording variables.
- Subjects
EXPERIMENTAL design; MATHEMATICAL optimization; SCIENTIFIC method; QUESTIONNAIRES; SURVEYS; INVESTIGATIONS
- Publication
Quality & Quantity, 1982, Vol 16, Issue 2, p69
- ISSN
0033-5177
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/BF00166878