COMM 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Meh

• School: U of M
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMM 101
• Professor: Julia Lippman

Document Summary

Take away #1: survey respondents treat questions as conversational. Survey optimizing: what survey designers hope you do: Turn the question into something you understand. Match that to the response categories: when survey respondents do what we want, we say they are optimizing. Many respondents do not optimize: they might not understand the question as intended, they might not do the most thorough possible search, the response categories might not match well. Optimization fails for two core reasons: confusion: respondents do not understand the questions or answers, satis cing: respondents are trying to get through the survey. How do respondents get confused: the questions don"t make sense. Would you say that harold and kumar go to white castle was a clever and humorous movie? : this is two questions bundled into one double barreled question (should never be used) Sometimes respondents don"t know enough to answer the question, but they try anyway.