Distinguished Lecture by Jon Krosnick

 

JPSM is sponsoring a Distinguished Lecture by Jon Krosnick on Friday, April 15.  The title is "Why Small Changes in Question Wording Can Produce Big Changes in Survey Measurement:  Unraveling Some Mysteries of Questionnaire Design with the Theory of Satisficing."

 

The talk will begin at 3:30 pm at 2205 LeFrak Hall on the University of Maryland, College Park Campus.  There will be a reception immediately afterwards.

 

The lecture will discuss the thousands of experiments published since the 1940s showing that small changes in the wording of questions or the ordering of questions or response choices can substantially affect the answers survey respondents provide.  Much more research has documented such effects than has explained the psychological mechanisms responsible for them. This talk will present the theory of survey satisficing, which offers a parsimonious explanation for a range of question wording, structuring, and ordering effects and ties them all to a single psychological mechanism and a single set of variables that are thought to turn these effects on and off.  A review of the accumulated social science literature documents wide-ranging empirical support for satisficing theory, which has clear implications for good measurement practice in surveys.

 

Jon Krosnick is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Stanford University. His questionnaire design work has illuminated the cognitive and social processes that unfold between researchers and respondents when the latter are asked to answer questions, and his on-going review of 100 years worth of scholarly research on the topic has yielded a set of guidelines for the optimal design of questionnaires to maximize reliability and validity. His recent work in survey methodology has explored the impact of mode of data collection (e.g., face-to-face, telephone, Internet) on response accuracy and the impact of survey response rates on substantive results.

 

There will be two discussants--Howard Schuman from the University of Michigan and Gordon Willis from NCI.  Please join us on the 15th.

Jon Krosnick is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Stanford University.

Howard Schuman (left) from the University of Michigan and Gordon Willis (right)  from NCI.