ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, psychologists and survey methodologists have made considerable progress in understanding the cognitive and communicative processes underlying survey responses, increasingly turning the “art of asking questions” (Payne, 1951) into an applied science that is grounded in basic psychological research. This chapter reviews key lessons learned from this work (for more extended reviews see Schwarz 1999a; Sirken, Hermann, Schechter, Schwarz, Tanur, & Tourangeau, 1999; Sudman, Bradburn, & Schwarz 1996; Tourangeau, Rips, & Rasinski 2000). We focus on how features of the research instrument shape respondents’ answers and illustrate how the underlying processes can change as a function of respondents’ age and culture. We first address respondents’ tasks and subsequently discuss how respondents make sense of the questions asked. Next, we review how respondents answer behavioral questions and relate these questions to issues of autobiographical memory and estimation. Finally, we address attitude questions and review the conditions that give rise to context effects in attitude measurement.
