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Public Opinion Quarterly 2005 69(3):417-428; doi:10.1093/poq/nfi028
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org.

Comparing the Quality of Data Obtained by Minimally Balanced and Fully Balanced Attitude Questions

Eric M. Shaeffer, Jon A. Krosnick, Gary E. Langer and Daniel M. Merkle

ERIC SHAEFFER is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at Ohio State University. JON KROSNICK is Professor of Communication, Political Science, and Psychology at Stanford University and University Fellow at Resources for the Future. GARY LANGER and DANIEL MERKLE are both with ABC News. This study was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health predoctoral fellowship awarded to the first author (NIMH grant T32-MH19728).

Address correspondence to Eric Shaeffer; e-mail: shaeffer.11{at}osu.edu.

When measuring attitudes with questions that offer dichotomous, mutually exclusive response options, researchers can ask "fully balanced" questions (which fully state both competing points of view) or "minimally balanced" questions (which fully state one viewpoint and only briefly acknowledge the second viewpoint). The two studies reported here investigated whether the greater efficiency of the latter approach brought with it reductions in the quality of the data obtained. Two experiments embedded in national sample surveys showed that minimally balanced and fully balanced attitude questions yielded similar distributions of responses and that responses to the two question forms were equivalent in terms of concurrent validity. These studies suggest that greater efficiency can be achieved via minimal balancing at no cost in terms of data quality.


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