Perception Question

Perception is the subjective process of acquiring, interpreting, and organizing sensory information. Survey questions that assess perception, as opposed to those assessing factual knowledge, are aimed at identifying the processes that (a) underlie how individuals acquire, interpret, organize, and, generally make sense of (i.e. form beliefs about) the environment in which they live; and (b) help measure the extent to which such perceptions affect individual behaviors and attitudes as a function of an individual's past experiences, biological makeup, expectations, goals, and/or culture.

Perception questions differ from other types of survey questions—behavioral, knowledge, attitudinal, or demographic—in that questions that measure perception ask respondents to provide information on how they perceive such matters as the effectiveness of programs, their health status, or the makeup of their community, among other specifie measures assessing biological, physiological, and psychological processes.

Broadly, research on perception is driven by many different kinds of questions that assess how individual senses and perceptions operate; how and why individuals are susceptible to perceptions or misperceptions; which structures in the brain support perception; and how individual perceptions acquire meaning. Research on the psychology of perception suggests that the actions of individuals are influenced by their perceptions of the opinions, values, and expectations of others, including those individuals identified as important by the respondent. This is of particular import to survey methodologists, because an individual's perceptions may influence her or his survey responses and, moreover, may be inaccurate. When this inaccuracy is systematic (biasing) rather than random, such inaccuracy has consequences for interpreting the survey data collected. Theory development on perception indicates that the accuracy of reported perceptions is related to communication mode, coordination efforts, and the salience of the percept. Other research finds that perceptions may be distorted by intimate relationships, attraction, personality traits, or indirect cues or interviewer effects, [Page 580]among other influences. Such influences may induce social desirability bias, where perception questions are improperly drafted or fail to account for question wording and ordering effects within the instrument and administration mode.

Including perception measures in a survey instrument enables researchers to investigate both qualitative and quantitative empirical hypotheses by incorporating open-ended and closed-ended measures that assess the way the respondent acquires, interprets, and organizes information, questions about the relationships among the respondent's perceptions, and the meaning of reported perceptions. To this end, introspection, experimental psychology, and neuroscience research are used to study perception in fields ranging from cognitive to computer science; each use different questions to measure perception. The method of introspection asks respondents to examine and report their conscious thoughts, reasoning, or sensations, such as the questioning used in cognitive interviewing. Here, respondents may be asked how their perceptions compare with the perceptions of other people.

The subjective nature of perception, however, presents a reliability problem. Because the survey interviewer or researcher cannot often easily or reliably identify whether a respondent is being truthful or accurate in her or his reports of a subjective experience, it is not possible to tell whether a particular word used to report an experience is being used to refer to the same kind of experience reported by another respondent. Thus, the reliability of introspection and the data collected using this method should be scrutinized carefully. Methods in experimental psychology include questions that prompt the participant to report, for example, object recognition, motion detection, visual illusions, and the like. In some cases, this report follows the participant performing a perceptual task. Neuroscience research uses perception questions to study attention and memory systems to identify how individuals store, organize, and retrieve perceptions as a way to understand information processing generally.

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