Qualitative researchers often turn to focus groups as an efficient and effective way to gather data in a collective context. A common critique is that they play into power dynamics present at the site, privileging dominant, high status, and more vocal participants. Traditional focus group structures also rely on participants to trust the…

Indirect questioning attempts to overcome social desirability bias in survey research. However, to properly analyze the resulting data, it is crucial to understand how it impacts responses. This study analyzes results from a randomized experiment that tests whether direct versus indirect questioning methods lead to different results in a sample of…

Participatory Theme Elicitation (PTE) is a new approach to increasing user-involvement in qualitative data analysis. In this five-step method, participants independently identify themes in the data using open card sorting, and are supported in their development of a set of themes that reflect all participant views. We describe and evaluate PTE…

The rise of smartphone surveys, coupled with technological advancements, provide new ways for measuring respondents' political attitudes. The use of open questions with requests for voice answers instead of text answers may simplify the answer process and provide nuanced information. So far, research comparing the measurement quality of text and…

Measuring respondents' attitudes is a crucial task in numerous social science disciplines. A popular way to measure attitudes is to use survey questions with rating scales. However, research has shown that especially the design of rating scales can have a profound impact on respondents' answer behavior. While some scale design aspects, such as…

Questionnaires routinely measure unipolar and bipolar constructs using rating scales. Such rating scales can offer odd numbers of points, meaning that they have explicit middle alternatives, or they can offer even numbers of points, omitting the middle alternative. By examining four types of questions in six national or regional telephone surveys,…

Bias may be introduced in survey data collection when participants answer questions differently depending on interviewer gender. This could affect the validity of collected data, especially sensitive data. Using sexual behavior data collected in a 2017-2018 cross-sectional survey of Haitian women (n = 304), we evaluated the associations between…

The justifiability scale (JS) is widely used to measure individual and country differences in moral attitudes. However, the validity of the instrument has been barely assessed. The current study addressed the concurrent and content validity of four popular JS items (justifiability of homosexuality, suicide, prostitution, and euthanasia). A sample…

Web surveys are an established data collection mode that use written language to provide information. The written language is accompanied by visual elements, such as presentation formats and shapes. However, research has shown that visual elements influence response behavior because respondents sometimes use interpretive heuristics to make sense…