Abstract
Although agree–disagree (AD) rating scales suffer from acquiescence response bias, entail enhanced cognitive burden, and yield data of lower quality, these scales remain popular with researchers due to practical considerations (e.g., ease of item preparation, speed of administration, and reduced administration costs). This article shows that if researchers want to use AD scales, they should offer 5 answer categories rather than 7 or 11, because the latter yield data of lower quality. This is shown using data from four multitrait-multimethod experiments implemented in the third round of the European Social Survey. The quality of items with different rating scale lengths were computed and compared.
Highlights
Agree-Disagree (AD) rating scales have been extremely popular in social science research questionnaires, they are susceptible to a host of biases and limitations
If the statement is “Immigration is bad for the economy,” acquiescence bias will lead to more negative opinions being expressed than if the statement is “Immigration is good for the economy.”
Since we were interested in the AD scales, we only kept the observations for the AD scales when an experiment mixed methods with AD scales and methods with Item Specific (IS) scales
Summary
Agree-Disagree (AD) rating scales have been extremely popular in social science research questionnaires, they are susceptible to a host of biases and limitations They are susceptible to acquiescence response bias (Krosnick, 1991): some respondents agree with the statement offered regardless of its content. If the statement is “Immigration is bad for the economy,” acquiescence bias will lead to more negative opinions being expressed than if the statement is “Immigration is good for the economy.” Some authors explain this tendency by people‟s natural disposition to be polite (e.g., Goldberg, 1990); others believe that some respondents perceive the researchers to be experts and assume that if they make an assertion, it must be true (Lenski and Leggett, 1960); still others attribute acquiescence to survey satisficing, a means of avoiding expending the effort needed to answer a question optimally by shortcutting the response process (Krosnick, 1991). A recent study (Billiet and Davidov, 2008) shows that acquiescence is quite stable over time, supporting the idea that acquiescence is a personality trait and not a circumstantial behavior.
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