Questionnaire Design, Interviewing and Attitude Measurement
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QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN, INTERVIEWING AND ATTITUDE MEASUREMENT To Betwyn New Edition A.N. Oppenheim CONTINUUM London and New York PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I INTRODUCTION TO SURVEY DESIGN 2 ANALYTICSURVEY DESIGNS 3 DESCRIPTIVESURVEY DESIGNS 4 PILOTWORK Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SEl 7NX 5 THEEXPLORATORY INTERVIEW 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6550 6 STANDARDIZEDINTERVIEWS 7 PLANNING 0 A. N. Oppenheim, 1966, 1992 QUESTIONNAIRE 8 QUESTIONWORDING First published as 'Questionnaire design and attitude measurement' by Basic Books, Inc., New York in 1966. This totally rewritten and recast 9 SOMEBASIC MEASUREMENT THEORY new edition first published in 1992 (reprinted 1993 and 1994) by 10DESIGNING ATTITUDE STATEMENTS 11 SCALING Reprinted 1996, 1997, 1998 (twice), 1999, 2000, 2001 ATTITUDE 12 PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES IN ATTITUDE STUDY British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data AND APPLICATIONS A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 13 VARIETIES ISBN 1 85567 043 7 (HBK) 14 DATAPROCESSING 0 8264 5176 4 (PBK) 15 STATISTICALANALYSIS Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data APPENDIXI: STATISTICSTEST A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress APPENDIX11: NOMOGRAPHSFOR THE TESTING OF All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any other means without PERCENTAGES the prior permission of the copyright holder. Please direct all enquiries to the publishers. INDEX Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd www.bidn'les.co.uk From the preface to the first edition: The world is full of well-meaning people who believe that anyone who can write plain English and has a modicum of common sense can produce a good questionnaire. This book is not for them. It is intended to help all those who, for one reason or another, have to design a questionnaire. It could serve as a textbook for research students and undergraduates in social psychology and sociology and for practitioners of Grket research. It could also help doctors, personnel officers, civil servants, criminologists, social anthropologists, teachers, and many others whose curios- ity or need for information may impel them into the quicksands of social research. Questionnaire design cannot be taught from books; every investigation presents new and different problems. A textbook can only hope to prevent some of the worst pitfalls and to give practical, do-it-yourself kind of information that will point the way out of difficulties. It is not meant to be a work of scholarship, nor is it exhaustive. The number of references has been kept to a minimum, though some annotated readings have been provided with each chapter. Throughout, clarity and basic ease of understanding have been my guidelines; in each case, an attempt has been made to present the main lines of the argument and, while not shirking weaknesses in underlying assumptions, to omit some of the more esoteric controversies. Preface to the new edition At the suggestion of many colleagues the book has been greatly expanded, as well as revised and updated. There are two new chapters on research design and sampling, two new chapters on interviewing, a chapter on questionnaire planning, a chapter on statistical analysis and a special chapter on pilot work. Other chapters have been changed and expanded, and a special set of Workshops has been introduced to offer practical experience. From having been a specialized text dealing with the design of questionnaires and attitude measures, it has broadened out and become a general survey research handbook. But its 2 Questionnaire Design, Interaiewing and Attitude Measurement objectives have not changed. It still aims to reach those who have little or no background in the social sciences, and those who lack the facilities which many Western academics take for granted, as well as research students starting their first project and the junior staff of social research agencies. Teachers of courses in survey methods may find the book particularly useful because of the wide variety of examples spread through the text. It is my hope that many will find this not just a book to read but to keep. In trying to make this text clearer, more accurate and better-written, I have sought the help of colleagues and graduate students. I owe much to their incisive critique and generosity of spirit and so does the reader. It is a pleasure to acknowledge my particular indebtedness to Neville Postlethwaite, Roger Thomas, Margaret Guy, Jennifer Marsh, Colin Taylor, Ronaldo Laranjeira, Julie Parker and Dan Wright. The responsibility for the book's remaining faults must be mine. Bram Oppenheim I wish to thank a number of people for their kind permission to use material London, January 1992 from their works, as follows: A.L. Baldwin, J. Kalhorn, and F.H. Breese, 'The Appraisal of Parent Behaviour', Psychological Monographs, XXIV (1949)~No. 299. E.S. Bogardus, 'Measuring Social Distances', Journal of Applied Psychology, IX (1925) No. 4. William Caudill, The Psychiatric Hospital as a Small Society (Harvard University Press, 1958). H.T. Himmelweit, A.N. Oppenheim, and P. Vince, Television and the Child (Oxford University Press, 1958). Michael Shepherd, A.A. Cooper, A.C. Brown, and G.W. Kalton, Psychiatric Illness in General Pracfice (Oxford University Press, 1981). The Open University. (Course DE.304) 1 INTRODUCTIONTO SURVEY DESIGN The need for good design Suppose you want to find out why some people keep pets such as dogs, cats, fish or cage-birds. You may have jotted down some questions and handed these to forty-two pet owners in your neighbourhood or you may have conducted forty- two interviews. Assuming that your questions are well formulated and that all your respondents have answered truthfully, would you be able to draw any conclusions from your findings? Probably not, unless by 'conclusions' you mean those which apply only to these particular forty-two people. Such very limited conclusions are likely to be of little interest since it would be quite unwarranted to draw any wider inferences from the responses. Your little survey would tell you nothing about pet owners in general, and the results obtained in your neighbourhood might be quite misleading not only about pet owners in general but even about the majority of pet owners in your neighbourhood. You might nevertheless be tempted to study your findings more closely, for instance to see if the motives of dog owners differ from those of cat owners, but again the findings would tell you nothing about dog owners versus cat owners in general or even those in your own neighbourhood. Nor could you test out the hypothesis that a pet is often a child substitute. It would, for example, be quite unwarranted to claim that your hypothesis had been supported because two-thirds of your sample were childless. It might be that more childless people answered your questions because you happened to know them or because they had the time or the inclination to do so. And besides, just because people are childless and have pets, this does not prove that they own pets because they are childless: associations do not establish causality. As before, it would also be wrong to draw any inferences from your findings which might apply to the childlessness of pet owners in general. Nor is it simply a question of numbers, for the same strictures would apply even if you had questioned many thousands of people. Moreover, there may be many reasons for keeping a pet; we should always avoid thinking in terms of simplistic monocausal models (see below and Chapter 2). In short, the need for an appropriate research design arises whenever we wish to generalize from our findings, either in terms of the frequency or prevalence of particular attributes or variables, or about the relationships between them. 6 Questionnaire Design, Interviewing and Attitude Measurement lntroduction to survey design 7 It is true, of course, that there are occasions when we wish to study a finite, the logic and standards of inference in any discipline. However the creation and special group, for example all the women in Dr Z's practice who gave birth to a application of measuring instruments and data collection techniques tend to be baby in year Y, or all the employees who left firm X in a given month. But even specific to each discipline or group of disciplines. Cross-disciplinary research, in these circumstances research design problems arise. Quite probably, we wish such as doctors conducting social surveys of their patients' smoking habits, to study these particular mothers, or job leavers, because we want to generalize familiarity with measuring techniques in more than one discipline. about them; or compare them to other such groups; or predict what may happen Here we shall be concerned primarily with the design of social surveys, the this year, or next; or use their responses in order to improve our procedures. But planned architecture of inquiry. In later chapters we shall deal with measure- unless our study is designed appropriately and is aimed at the correct target ment and instrument building, that is with research techniques such as scales and population, we will be unable to draw any such conclusions or comparisons. pestionnaires. However, as we have indicated before, these two aspects of There may also be non-response problems (see Chapter 7) so that some of the research are often interlinked. The design of the research will determine whom necessary information will be missing, and the remainder of the responses may we should question and what questions we should ask, while technical and be biased. These matters will present us with further research design problems.