I read an interesting story about a survey done to determine if people are honest with pollsters. Of course such a study is flawed by definition (how can we be sure those who say they always tell the truth, are not lying?). Still, the results do back up what I’ve long suspected…getting at the truth in a survey is hard.
The study indicates that most people claim to be honest, even about very personal things (like financing). Younger people, however, are less likely to be honest with survey takers than others. As noted above, I suspect that if anything, the results understate the potential problem.
To be clear, I don’t think that people are just being dishonest for the sake of being dishonest….I think it flows from a few factors.
First, some questions are too personal to answer, even on a web survey. With all the stories of personal financial data being stolen or compromising pictures being hacked, it shouldn’t surprise us that some people might not want to answer some kinds of questions. We should really think about that as we design questions. For example, while it might be easy to ask for a lot of detail, we might not always need it (income ranges for example). To the extent we do need it, finding ways to build credibility with the respondent are critical.
Second, some questions might create a conflict between what people want to believe about themselves and the truth. People might want to think of themselves as being “outgoing” and so if you ask them they might say they are. But their behavior might not line up with reality. The simple solution is to ask questions related to behavior without ascribing a term like “outgoing”. Of course, it is always worth asking it directly as well (knowing the self image AND behavior could make for interesting segmentations variables for example).
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