Polling on police use of body cameras: The effect of response option order on distribution and concurrent validity

Abstract

Debates on key features of policing are far from settled and are highly politicized. However, a majority of the public favors the use of body cameras when asked whether they favor or oppose their use. Knowing that “favoring” overall might encompass several perspectives, we sought to document how frequently the public thought police should use body cameras: all the time with no exceptions, all the time with minimal exceptions, some of the time, or never. We were then confronted with a perennial survey design issue—how to order these response options in our web survey? We randomly assigned respondents to receive one of two response option orderings: from “never” to “all the time with no exceptions” and the reverse. Because we asked respondents about their support for or attitudes about items related to policing, we had the opportunity to examine the concurrent validity of each of the two versions of the item by examining their correlation with the related items. Overall, the results suggest when polling about police use of body cameras in terms of relative frequencies, the response options should be ordered starting with “never” or the lowest frequency.