Anchoring and Adjusting in Questionnaire Responses

By Hunter Gehlbach, Scott Barge. 2012

88 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Do survey designers bias respondents' answers on attitude/opinion questionnaires through the organization of their survey items? We hypothesize that respondents often employ an anchoring and adjusting strategy in which their response to an initial survey item provides a cognitive anchor from which they insufficiently adjust in answering the subsequent item. Three experiments indicate that respondents often anchor and insufficiently adjust in certain situations. Ultimately, this tendency can affect reliability estimates of scales and the resultant correlations with other measures. In organizing their surveys, researchers may wish to combat this bias by intermixing items designed for different but related constructs.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ada6eed5eac6701a508e38807c29f7d3c6ce753

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In Management Science and Operations Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Applying Social Psychology to Prevent Careless Responding during Online Surveys (2018, background): “Cognitive demands associated with completing surveys have been investigated as causes of CR (Gehlbach & Barge, 2012; Krosnick, 1991; Weijters, De Beuckelaer, & Baumgartner, 2014), but there remains a need for investigations into how to best arrange survey items based on cognitive demands imposed on…”
“This is a Problem, Don’t You Agree?” Framing and Bias in Human Evaluation for Natural Language Generation (2020, methodology): “Past efforts to address this have included overviews of evaluation design practices used during a particular time span (Amidei et al., 2018; Gkatzia and Mahamood, 2015; van der Lee et al., 2019) with corresponding recommendations for best practices (van der Lee et al., 2019) and empirical studies…”