Public willingness to participate in surveys has been diminishing since the 1960s as a result of concerns over the confidentiality of the information. The effectiveness of confidentiality assurances on public willingness to participate is examined.

The general hypothesis that a stronger assurance of confidentiality improves survey response is tested by means of a meta-analysis of the experimental literature. No support is found for the general hypothesis, but the subsidiary hypothesis, that confidentiality assurances improve response when the data asked about are sensitive, is supported. Under those circumstances, the effect of… Continue reading Confidentiality assurances and response – A quantitative review of the experimental literature

In attempting to move questionnaire design from art to science, researchers use different evaluation techniques to help determine how well questions are working. Techniques such as behavior coding, respondent debriefing, interviewer debriefing, cognitive interviewing, and nonresponse analysis all provide information to help the questionnaire designer assess whether respondents understand questions as intended and whether they… Continue reading Predicting test-retest reliability from behavior coding

Researchers carried out two experiments to investigate how the shading of the options in a response scale affected the answers to the survey questions. The experiments were embedded in two Web surveys, and they varied whether the two ends of the scale were represented by shades of the same or different hues. They predicted that… Continue reading Color, Labels, and Interpretive Heuristics for Response Scales

Survey self-reports of health status, symptoms (pain and fatigue), and life satisfaction often serve as outcomes in clinical trials. Prior studies have shown, however, that such reports can be subject to context effects, which could threaten their validity. We examined the impact of 2 context effects: the effect of the reporting period associated with a… Continue reading Context Effects in Survey Ratings of Health, Symptoms, and Satisfaction

Increasing use of incentive payments to survey respondents raises the threat of several unintended consequences, among them the creation of expectations for future payments and the possibility of a deterioration in the quality of response. The findings from the present study are somewhat reassuring with respect to both of these unintended outcomes. Although people who… Continue reading Does the payment of incentives create expectation effects?

Economic theory assigns a central role to risk preferences. This article develops a measure of relative risk tolerance using responses to hypothetical income gambles in the Health and Retirement Study. In contrast to most survey measures that produce an ordinal metric, this article shows how to construct a cardinal proxy for the risk tolerance of… Continue reading Imputing Risk Tolerance From Survey Responses