Question

In designing a survey questionnaire, one concern to the designer is to avoid including survey questions that appear to be biased. Namely, a suggestion or hint cited in the question that may lead the responder to choosing one response over an alternative.

As an example, a survey was being developed to question the drinking preferences of a select sample of college students. The primary objective of the survey was to gain responses to the basic question, "Which do you prefer, milk or orange juice?" However, an experimental question included in the survey questionnaire was as follows: "Milk contains high levels of vitamin D and calcium. Do you prefer milk or orange juice?"

Would you consider this "experimental question" to be biased or unbiased? Explain your answer.

Answer 1

This experimental question is biased.

As this question "Do you prefer milk or orange juice " has an additional part " milk contains high level of vitamin D and calcium" . It is leading to the answer "Prefer milk"

This type of question is called leading question .

The biased introduced is the response bias. The thought process of the respondents move towards goodness of milk. And for the sake of giving acceptable answer , the respondent may give incorrect response.

This leads to incorrect data collection. Thus the experimental question should be designed in such a way that do not introduce any bias and can gather true data.