© 1999 by Oxford University Press
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What respondents do with questionnaires: accounting for incongruity and fluidity
EFL Unit, Language Teaching Centre, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK E-mail: gdl1@york.ac.uk
Much remains to be learned about how respondents go about answering written questionnaires. The present study focused on Likert-type questionnaires with agree or approve rating scales, and used the data from a small Think Aloud (TA) study involving nine university students to explore reactions to items involving incongruity. An earlier paper (Low 1996a) had suggested that the phenomenon of transforming items by moving or reduplicating words might be connected with reactions to incongruity. Close analysis of the TA utterances revealed the use at various points of all or part of a sequence of response strategies which I call 'the Scale Construction approach'; the sequence was as follows. The respondent first produced a personal reaction to the statement. Where his/her focus differed from that of the designer, a new dimension was constructed and scaled. The respondent's personal reaction was then located on the new scale, making use of the verbal labels that the designer happened to have put at the chosen (scale) point. Though the hypothesized link between movement and incongruity was not supported, the data did not suggest reasons for moving or reduplicating words. Movement was used (a) to help construct a personal reaction, or (b) as part of an exploratory phase whereby the respondent tested whether s/he was happy with his/her reaction. The 'scale construction' approach is shown to be compatible with, though more general than, Sommer's (1991) suggestion of metaphoric response and to have greater explanatory power than his notion of an internal rating template. In sum, it constitutes a common-sense strategy of wanting to convey one's own ideas in minimally interactive circumstances.