Ken drew my attention to a really interesting little piece that shows that when answering questions via a Likert scale people are biased towards responses on the left of the page, a phenomenon known as psuedoneglect. So a descending scale (good,fair,bad) will get a better response than an ascending one. This clearly has implications for survey design as well as helping some of us improve our teaching evaluations. It would be interesting to know if there is any bias when the scale is arranged vertically: the theory would say not.
Michael E.R. Nicholls, Catherine A. Orr, Matia Okubo, Andrea Loftus (2006)
Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Effect of Spatial Biases on Responses to Likert Scales
Psychological Science 17 (12), 1027–1028.
6 comments:
It also may have implications for MCQ tests,are students more likely to pick A as an answer than E for example if they are in a line?
The possible implicatiosn for MCQ tests is a really interesting angle.
The link to the blog on the Geary Behaviour site went on the blink again tonight, so I went to blogger.com to get access and was forced to change over to a Gmail sign-in.
But its possible to make comments with a Gmail sign-in now, which is the main thing.
great, we can blog again. Martin, can you get that paper when you have a chance. We have to try this out!
i was looking at the paper, the effect though statistically significant really does some tiny. Although, as Martin pointed out, Florida elections have been decided on less!
I don't have the paper with me but I thought some of the size effects were big ,the number 27% comes to mind for some reason.
Thats an interesting test Aileen: the theory is that there is bias towards the left side of the visual field so it should make no difference.But if the bias is towards what we see first then it might be towards what's on top of the page.
One could further push this by looking at how left-right readers do on up-down scales compared to left-right ones and similarly with up-down readers like the Chinese or right-left readers like Arabs.
If that's not complicated enough, one could also compare left-handers with right-handers.
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