Effects of Respondent and Survey Characteristics on the Response Quality of an Open-Ended Attitude Question in Web Surveys

Abstract: Open-ended questions have a great potential for analyses, but answering them often imposes a great burden on respondents. Relying on satisficing theory as an overarching theoretical framework, we derived several hypotheses about how respondent and survey level characteristics, and their interactions, might affect the quality of the responses to an open-ended attitude question in self-administered surveys. By applying multilevel analyses to data from 29 web surveys, we examined the effects of respondent and survey level characteristics on three indicators of response quality: response length, response latency, and the interpretability of the answers. With respect to all three indicators, we found that more educated and more motivated respondents provided answers of significantly better quality compared to other respondents. However, the present study provides evidence that analyzing response quality exclusively with process-generated measures of quality may produce a misleading pict

Object Details

• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Effects of Respondent and Survey Characteristics on the Response Quality of an Open-Ended Attitude Question in Web Surveys ; volume:14 ; number:1 ; year:2020 ; pages:3-34 ; Veröffentlichungsversion ; begutachtet (peer reviewed) ; Methods, data, analyses ; 14, Heft 1 (2020), 3-34

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie, Anthropologie

Contributors, Places and Time

• Creator: Schmidt, Katharina ; Gummer, Tobias ; Roßmann, Joss

Further information

• DOI: 10.12758/mda.2019.05
• URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2021020515415685072414
• Rights: Open Access; Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
• Last update: 15.08.2025, 7:22 AM CEST