Comprehension

Survey researchers, in developing questions, must bear in mind the respondent's ability to correctly grasp the question and any response categories associated with the question. Comprehension, which is denned in this [Page 118]context as a respondent's ability to accurately understand a question and associated response categories, is crucial to reliable measurement of attitudes and behaviors.

Scholars have identified a number of elements in question wording that can interfere with comprehension: ambiguous language, vague wording, complex sentence structures, and presuppositions about the experiences of the respondent. The consequences of comprehension problems can be severe. If respondents' understanding of the question varies significantly from one respondent to another, the responses could provide a highly distorted picture of an attitude or behavior at the aggregate level.

Researchers have identified a number of techniques and guidelines to reduce the potential effects of question wording on comprehension:

• 1.
  Use clear, simple language in questions.
• 2.
  Use simple question structures, minimizing the number of clauses in a question.
• 3.
  Include a screening question if the survey is measuring attitudes or behaviors that might be unique to a specific group, and thereby skip all other respondents past the measures targeted to that group.
• 4.
  Provide definitions or examples in questions that may have terms that are ambiguous or vague.
• 5.
  Offer a frame of reference for terms that define a period of time (e.g. “in the past 7 days” as opposed to “recently”).
• 6.
  Train interviewers to recognize problems with comprehension, and provide the interviewers with a uniform set of definitions and probes to address the problems.
• 7.
  Pretest survey questions not only with survey interviews, but in qualitative settings such as focus groups or in-depth cognitive interviews if resources permit.