Rating scales:
- Most widely used response format, respondents provide ratings indicating how strongly they feel positively or negatively on n issue
- Likert scales use words to anchor the numerical ratings
- Typically respondents are not capable of making distinctions between adjacent points on scales with 11 or more anchors
- Better to force people to make decisions rather than ‘neither agree/disagree’, some people’s personality types lend themselves to not express opinions
Open ended advantages:
- Responses can convey information that cannot be realistically captured in fixed answer format
- For sensitive topics, it ca be more useful for people to respond in a less constrained way
- When delivering a report based on a survey, it can be useful to compliment a report with qualitative statements derived from the open-ended surveys
- Allow people to express precise feelings and attitudes, give people the sense their opinion matters
Open ended disadvantages:
- Take a relatively long time for the respondent to complete
- People may get tired or bored by the end of the survey and answer the last questions perfunctorily
- Some people will be so uninterested that they will give very poor open ended responses
- Analysis of questions is time consuming
- Answers are not quantitative (don’t measure, can’t correlate)
- Some people are not good at providing responses
Negatively keyed terms:
- Usually good practice to include a mixed of positively and negatively keyed items
- By including in negatively keyed items, you prevent people from getting a response set
Double barrelled items:
- Asks two or more questions in the same item which may be expected to be answered differently by at least some respondents
Anytime you see the word ‘and’ or ‘or’ in an item, signals a double barrelled item