City Research Online

Abstract

Previous research highlights the impact of nonverbal cues and visual layouts on respondents’ interpretations and answers to survey questions (Schwarz et al. in Pub Opin Q 55(4):570–582, 1991; Tourangeau et al. in Pub Opin Q 71(1):91–112, 2007; Toepoel and Dillman in Soc Sci Comput Rev 29(2):193–207, 2011). In this study, we investigate the effect of numerical values on responses to five questions measured using 11-point bipolar scales. These questions asked for evaluations of the general impact of climate change and its effects on different groups. Respondents were randomly assigned to scales ranging from 0 to 10, or from − 5 to + 5. The scales were presented horizontally and had identical verbal endpoints anchored as “extremely negative” and “extremely positive”. The experiment was embedded in a cross-national face-to-face survey conducted in Hungary, Portugal, and Great Britain. Contrary to prior research (Schwarz et al. in Pub Opin Q 55(4):570–582, 1991; O’Muircheartaigh et al. J Off Stat 11:295–308, 1995; Tourangeau et al. in Pub Opin Q 71(1):91–112, 2007), our analyses show an opposite trend: the means tend to be consistently and significantly lower for the − 5/+5 scale. The discrepancy between our findings and previous studies suggests that the interpretations of the 0/10 and − 5/+5 scales could be item specific. The implications of these findings and how they fit with previous work are discussed.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Survey methodology, Questionnaire design, Visual cues, Response scales, Numerical labels
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HA Statistics
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > European Social Survey
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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