Conformity Bias occurs when the respondent gives an answer that is socially desirable rather than an answer that reflects their true feelings. This bias in the data compromises the value of the data and our analysis.
Current experience with an RCV election shows a lack of transparency, ease, or simplicity. But it’s not clear how to win RCV elections.
Checklist questions are one of the more common survey question types, and they are also used heavily in data collection forms, which are a form of survey. And for good reason. You can get specific, actionable answers to a question – if the question is written correctly. A poorly designed checklist question can hide problems and confuse interpretation.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a different voting process that is being pushed due to purported benefits. This article describes the concept along with its pros and its cons.
Surveys are conducted to learn how some group feels. If the survey questions are flawed, then we don’t learn and may be misled. Ambiguous questions — questions whose phrasing leads to multiple interpretations — are the single biggest mistake made by survey designers. And perhaps a fatal one.
Various survey question types can be used to measure something. The choices have trade-offs between analytical usefulness of the data and respondent burden.
A confluence of survey biases – response, interviewer & instrumentation – likely overwhelmed what the NY Times’ surveyors think they measured about people’s feelings about having a female presidential candidate.
I’m anxious about your reaction to this article.
Unclear what I mean by that? That’s exactly the point. When designing survey questions and response scales for interval rating questions, It is critical to have “clarity of meaning” and “lack of ambiguity.” Without those you won’t be capturing valid, useful data, data that don’t suffer from instrumentation bias. “Anxious” is an anchor that has multiple meanings and thus should not be used in political surveys. Yet it is.
Proper survey question wording is essential to generate valid, meaningful data for organizational decisions. A survey question wording bias will lead to misleading interpretations and bad decisions. Here we examine a Pew survey on use of mobile devices in public settings.
Good question phrasing is an art form, and even the pros can make mistakes. Here we’ll show a question wording bias example from a survey done by Pew Research Center. Ambiguity in question wording likely led to incorrect data and conclusions. It provides some useful lessons for all survey designers.