Monday, November 28, 2011

That would be a "yes"

Over the weekend I was doing some research surveys, and encountered this question:

"If there was no PET scan machine available, would that prevent you from ordering one?"

8 comments:

  1. What kind of stupid question is that?

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  2. I don't know, I think if all else failed and my consultant was insisting that the PET scan was essential, I'd be tempted to request it just to see if someone else would take over the problem of acquiring it.

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  3. No PET scan machine . . . anywhere? What kind of a nightmare alternate world is this? o.o

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  4. Geez, even I knew the answer to that one! On a tragic note, I did once have a boss (a really, really really horrible boss) write in one of my evaluations that I failed to utilize a certain psychological test. It didn't matter that I didn't have that test, and that it was not given to me even when I requested it (which I could prove with emails).

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  5. If there were no subjunctive tense in English, would that prevent them from using it?

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  6. I would have to answer No just to skew their results...

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  7. These types of questions - some of which you pointed out before - are often posted into questionaires quite deliberately. Basically they are used to check for two things, both of which would exclude your questionaire from evaluation/decrease its impact factor on the overall result: Sometimes people just randomly fill out questionaire they got with nonsense answers. (Really, its another form of nonresponse thats a bit harder to detect and can skewer results) Having one or two such ''senseless'' questions weeds out these blanks to a high degree. The other one is related: Checking whether the participant actually read the questions thoroughly before answering (which has an impact on the validity of the study). To that end an item is often operationalized in both a simple positive and a negative form.

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So wadda you think?