Questions To Measure Subjective States

1. Questions To Measure Subjective States

2. Questions To Measure Subjective States • Address the measurement of people ‘s subjective states: their knowledge, and perceptions, their feelings and their judgments • There is no right or wrong answers to questions • The standards for subjective states are the same as the factual question

3. Describing and Evacuating People, Place, and Things Example of question objective • How friendly is your doctor? • How does the level of crime in this neighborhood compare with crime rates in other neighborhoods in the city?

4. Describing and Evacuating People, Place, and Things Example of self perceptions • How frequently are you happy? • How interested are you in political events? Example putting some perceptions against standards Would you say your current weight is too much , about right or too little?

5. Defining What Is to be Rated • It is important that everyone be answering the same question. Therefore, what is being rated can be specified more clearly. • Example How would you rate your health excellent, very good, fair, or poor? (meaning of health is not consistent across all respondents)

6. Defining What Is to be Rated • It is important that everyone be answering the same question. • Example In general, do you think government official care about your interests a lot, some, only little, or not at all? Government office are very heterogeneous lot

7. Defining What Is to be Rated • It is important that everyone be answering the same question. • Example Do you consider crime to be a big problem , some problem, or no problem at all? Crime is heterogeneous Question did not specify a locus for the problem : neighborhood, city , local region or nation People tend to rate the crime problem in their own neighborhood as less severe than average.

8. The Response Task Respondents may be asked to: • Answer in agree-disagree form • Rank order several objects • Answer in narrative open-ended form • Use magnitude estimation techniques.

9. The Response Task Defining the rating Dimension Excellent Very Good Good Fair Poor 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 0 Good Not Good

10. The Response Task • Example • Overall, how would you rate your health? • (using every time different scale) • People tend to use the scales differently the level of health to be good maybe considered to be fair by another person • This will cause the error in measurement

11. The Response Task • Example • How would you say you feel about your lawn? Would you say: Very satisfied Somewhat satisfied Satisfied Not satisfied • ( some what satisfied is lower than satisfied) • (if adjectival labels are to be used, it is critical that their order be unambiguous)

12. The Response Task • Example • Which category best describe your physician? • Very competent and businesslike • Very competent and friendly • Fairly competent and friendly • Fairly competent and not friendly • (two dimensions in the response categories)

13. The Response Task • Having respondent deal with two dimensions at time is a mistake. Good survey design will ask respondent to place answer in a single, well defined dimension

14. The Response Task Characteristic of categories or scales How many categories to offer 1. valid information can be obtained , more categories are better than fewer (studies show more than 10 categories add little new valid information) ( the administration of the survey being self-administrated , or by telephone) (researcher prefer to use 3-4 categories across telephone) 2. maximize the extent to which people are distributed across the response

15. The Response Task Characteristic of categories or scales Whether to use scales defined by number or by objectives Example: On scale from 0-10, where 10 is positive as you can be and 0 is negative as you can be , how would you rate the movie you saw last night? (middle point 5 what is mean)

16. The Response Task Characteristic of categories or scales Whether to use scales defined by number or by objectives Example: On scale from -5-+5, where 5 is positive as you can be and -5 is negative as you can be , how would you rate the movie you saw last night?

17. The Response Task Characteristic of categories or scales We assume the distribution across the two scales should be the same It was found the people tend to have more positive feeling in the second scale than the first one The people inconsistent in the way that use middle part

18. The Response Task Characteristic of categories or scales Use adjective scale to achieve consistency Problem (it is not easy to think up adjectives for more than 5-6 points Not easy to use over telephone Exact translation across languages )

19. Using Agree or Disagree Format Example My health is excellent we know where to put in continuum I am sometimes depressed (people could disagree because understate or overstate the problem )

20. Using Agree or Disagree Format Drawbacks • Items have be unambiguously at an end of a continuum , so disagree can be interpreted unambiguously • Cognitively complex (disagreeing that one is seldom depressed is a complicated way of saying one is often is depressed • Answers usually analyzed in two response categories • tendency of less educated people to answer agree

21. Using Agree or Disagree Format Measuring respondents feeling about idea or policies, agree-disagree question is difficult to avoid

22. Rank Ordering • Give a list of options and asked to rank order them from top to bottom • Give a list of options and asked to name the most • Respondents can be asked a series of paired comparison • Respondent can be given a list and asked to rate each one using some scale

23. Type of Questions • Closed-Ended Questions Limit respondents’ answers to the survey , the participant allowed to choose from either a pre-existing set of dichotomous answers such as yes/no true/false or multiple choice

24. Closed-Ended Question Advantages • Easy to analyze • More specific, thus more likely to communicate similar meaning • Take less time in large scale survey

25. Type of Questions • Open-Ended Questions Do not give respondents answers to choose from, but rather are phrased so that the respondents are encouraged to explain their answers and reactions to the question with sentences.

26. The Role of Open-Ended or Narrative Question • If ordering response is the goal, narrative response cannot used (everyone should work with the same scale) • When the purpose of a question is to identify priorities or preferences among various items What do you consider to be the most important problem facing your city government today ?

27. The Role of Open-Ended or Narrative Question • Advantages 1. it does not limit to those the researcher thought of (include more information) 2. no visual aids, so it works on the telephone • Disadvantage 1. diversity of answer may make the results hard to analyze

28. Magnitude Estimation • The distance between the categories in the scaling measurement has not been assumed to have meaning • the technique that people have used that seems most successful at giving more absolute meaning is magnitude estimation

29. Magnitude Estimation • Example • We are going to ask you to use numbers to describe the social standing of people doing different jobs. Let us define the social standing of a person doing the work of carpenter as 100. if you think the social standing of a person doing a different kind of job is twice as great as that of carpenter, you would assign them a number 200, if you thought the social standing of a person was half of the carpenter , you would assign them a number of 50

30. Questions ?