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Salience of survey burden and its effects on response behavior to skip questions
Experimental results from telephone and web-surveys
Kreuter, F., Eckman, S., & Tourangeau, R. (2019). Salience of survey burden and its effects on response behavior to skip questions: Experimental results from telephone and web-surveys. In P. C. Beatty, D. Collins, L. Kaye, J-L. Padilla, G. B. Willis, & M. Wilmot (Eds.), Advances in Questionnaire Design, Development, Evaluation and Testing (pp. 213-228). Wiley. Advance online publication. https://books.google.com/books/about/Advances_in_Questionnaire_Design_Develop.html?id=z5pMjwEACAAJ
Survey questionnaires often contain skip patterns, which let respondents skip over entire sections or a set of follow-up questions that do not apply to them, and thus allow them to proceed through the interview faster. Survey designers might ask how filter and follow-up questions can be presented to reduce the risk of motivated underreporting. We designed a series of experiments in which we varied the salience of the repetitive nature of filter and follow-up questions. The results show that changes in topic removed the salience of the filtering patterns. Using slightly varied follow-up questions and reducing the repetitiveness of the task increased endorsements to filter questions and thus successfully mitigated the effect of motivated underreporting. On the other hand, a visualization of the filtering by greying out items that no longer need to be answered reduced endorsements. Implications for questionnaire design involving filter questions are discussed.