PSY495 Psychology of survey response

Faculty of Social Studies
Autumn 2009
Extent and Intensity
1/1. 4 credit(s). Type of Completion: z (credit).
Teacher(s)
doc. Mgr. Stanislav Ježek, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Mgr. Aleš Neusar (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
doc. Mgr. Stanislav Ježek, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology – Faculty of Social Studies
Contact Person: doc. Mgr. Stanislav Ježek, Ph.D.
Timetable
Tue 18:00–19:30 M117
Prerequisites
Course requires introductory knowledge of research methods in social sciences, cognitive psychology and social cognition.
Course is intended mainly for psychology students, but students of other social sciences and other fields that use survey as a source of data can successfully follow the course.
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 20 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/20, only registered: 0/20, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/20
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
Course objectives
The course covers the main areas of the psychology of answering and asking survey questions. The main objective of the course is to understand the cognitive and social cognitive theory behind the common rules and recommendations for the construction of questions arranging them into questionnaires or interview schedules. We also lool at ways this response theory can be and often is misused to bias the results of a survey. Student will gain the ability to critically judge the potential weaknesses of individual items and complete questionnaires or interview schedules and to support their judgement by using the cognitive interview. During the course students in teams complete several small experimental research projects demonstrating the various cognitive aspects of survey methodology.
Syllabus
  • 1. Introduction: Review of elementary empirical rules and recommendations about the construction of items and questionnaires/interview schedules.
  • 2. Theories of the response process to a survey questions: Cannel et al., Tourangeau et al., high road/low road, satisficing. Types of questions: Dates and durations, frequencies and ratings of behaviors, attitudinal questions, values, beliefs, preferences, sensitive questions.
  • 3. Understanding questions: Semantic vs pragmatic leads to understanding. Cognitive, syntactic factors - complexity, clarity, logical consistency, vague words and quantifiers. Social cognitive, pragmatic factors, Gricean maxims, using the social context of the question.
  • 4. Retrieval from memory: memory "sins", cues, suggestion, telescoping. Retrieval Hříchy paměti, nápovědi, sugesce, teleskopování. Retrieval from epizodic memory – reference periods. Self vs. proxy report. Autobiographical memory – structure, retrieval, forgetting. Memory for dates and durations.
  • 5. Judgement: estimation of frequencies and intensities of behaviors and experiences. Heuristics: reprezentativeness, availability, anchoring and adjustment. Answering attitude questions, assimilation and contrast effects.
  • 6. Editing response before answering: response choice, open ves. closed questions, response options and scales, rounding, context cues, order effects. Editing – sensitivity, desirability, decency, consistency. Nonresponse, misreporting.
  • 7. Validation methods, cognitive interview: Protocols, think-alouds verbal probes, behaviorla coding, experiments, debriefing.
Literature
  • TOURANGEAU, Roger and Kenneth A. RASINSKI. The psychology of survey response. Edited by Lance J. Rips. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, xiii, 401. ISBN 0521576296. URL info
  • WILLIS, Gordon Bruce. Cognitive interviewing. A tool for improving questionnaire design. Thousand Oaks, California, USA: Sage Publications, 2005, 335 pp. ISBN 0761928030. info
Teaching methods
class discussion, research projects
Assessment methods
Students in teams are required to participate in several small research projects. The grade is based of the quality of the submitted reports.
Language of instruction
Czech
Further Comments
Study Materials
The course is taught annually.
The course is also listed under the following terms Autumn 2007, Autumn 2008.
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/fss/autumn2009/PSY495