CHAPTER 4: ALTERNATIVES TO EXPERIMENTATION: SURVEY AND INTERVIEW

Survey research

a useful way of obtaining information about people’s opinion, attitudes, preferences, and behavior by simply asking them.

closed question

can be answered using limited number of alternatives and have a high imposition unit.

open-ended questions

require that participant respond with more than a yes or no and have low imposition units.

content analysis

similar to coding behaviors using systematics observational techniques.

Response bias

the tendency to consistently give the same answer to almost of the items on a survey.

Response Style

tendencies to respond to questions or test items without regard to their actual wording

Willingness to answer

the tendency to guess or omit items when unsure.

Position preference

selecting an answer based on its position

Manifest Content

context is derived from the visible and literal meaning of the words

Yea-saying

agreeing with an item regardless of its manifest content.

Nay-saying

disagreeing with an item regardless of its manifest content

Context effects

changes in question interpretation due to their position within a survey. Two questions are related and not separated by buffer items

structured interviews

questions are asked the same way each time. This provides more usable, quantifiable data.

unstructured interviews

the interviewer can explore interesting topics as they arise. These data may not be usable for content analysis