Questionnaire-Related Measurement Error

Questionnaire-related Measurement Error Questionnaire- related measurement error could have occurred in a couple questions within our survey because of the way that the questions were worded and the possible answers that were listed. One of the questions where this occurred was in question 8 that asks, “Should the U.S. immigration laws be made stricter, looser, stay about the same, or are you uncertain?” This represents a questionnaire- related measurement error because this question does not provide all the answers that respondents may give, which forces them to chose an answer that they originally did not want to give. For this question I received an answer from a respondent that said the laws should be smarter and that answer was not listed, …show more content…
Doing this would also reduce extraneous comments that could lead to the respondent becoming confused about what was being asked of them. To further reduce interviewer- related error in our class survey our professor required us to attend a class that was specifically designed for learning how to be an interviewer, which allowed us to gain some knowledge into how we were suppose to conduct our survey with as little error as possible. Another step that I believe was taken to reduce interviewer error was not asking the gender of the respondent. I believe that Professor Lavrakas did this to ensure as little gender bias as possible. Although, eliminating interviewer error is impossible the steps listed are ways that could help significantly reduce the amount of error made by the …show more content…
This is also known as response bias and one possible reason for why it may have occurred in our class survey could be because respondents may have felt inclined to give a certain answer in order to put himself or herself in a positive light towards the person that is interviewing them, which is known as social desirability bias. Respondents may have also caused error because they lacked interested in the topic that was being discussed, which in our case was issues surrounding our country and the upcoming U.S. election this is known as straight lining. I personally experienced this when I had interviewed respondents because it seemed that some of the respondents would say “I don’t know” or “I don’t care” showing that they did not care to put much effort into answering the survey to the best of there ability. Respondents also have the tendency to choose the answers that come early or first in a list, which is known as primacy bias. I saw this when interviewing respondents because with certain questions respondents would not allow me to finish the question they would just say one of the first two answers rather then listening to the question and giving a thorough and honest answer. I saw this happen in the class survey when it came to question 1, which asked, “Overall, please tell me how you think Doug Ducey is handling his job as