LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Describe the cognitive processes involved in responding to a survey item.
- Explain what a context effect is and give some examples.
- Create a simple survey questionnaire based on principles of effective item writing and organization.
The heart of any survey research project is the survey questionnaire itself. Although it is easy to think of interesting questions to ask people, constructing a good survey questionnaire is not easy at all. The problem is that the answers people give can be influenced in unintended ways by the wording of the items, the order of the items, the response options provided, and many other factors. At best, these influences add noise to the data. At worst, they result in systematic biases and misleading results. In this section, therefore, we consider some principles for constructing survey questionnaires to minimize these unintended effects and thereby maximize the reliability and validity of respondents’ answers.
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