Survey Confessions: The Impact of Survey Design on Honesty

This article looks at the ways in which better designed surveys can reveal more honest answers, through a study that calculated honesty using innocuous, sensitive, and outright impertinent questions.

Survey Confessions: The Impact of Survey Design on Honesty

Alexander Wheatley Lightspeed GMI

Understanding the problem

If we want to find out the answer to a direct question obviously we have to first ask that question. As researchers we understand that if a question doesn't have an objective answer how we ask that question can more often than not affect the answer we receive. However what we tend to overlook is that this can be the case even for questions with a factual answer. An honest answer is not something the researcher can take for granted; hence asking our...

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