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Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on May 28, 2009
Public Opinion Quarterly 2009 73(2):304-324; doi:10.1093/poq/nfp023
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© The Author 2009. 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@oxfordjournals.org

Optimal Design of Branching Questions to Measure Bipolar Constructs

Neil Malhotra, Jon A. Krosnick and Randall K. Thomas

Address correspondence to Neil Malhotra; e-mail: neilm{at}stanford.edu, Jon Krosnick; e-mail: krosnick{at}stanford.edu, or Randall Thomas; e-mail: randall.k.thomas{at}gmail.com.

Scholars routinely employ rating scales to measure attitudes and other bipolar constructs via questionnaires, and prior research indicates that this is best done using sequences of branching questions in order to maximize measurement reliability and validity. To identify the optimal design of branching questions, this study analyzed data from several national surveys using various modes of interviewing. We compared two branching techniques and different ways of using responses to build rating scales. Three general conclusions received empirical support: (1) after an initial three-option question assessing direction (e.g., like, dislike, neither), respondents who select one of the endpoints should be asked to choose among three levels of extremity, (2) respondents who initially select a midpoint with a precise label should not be asked whether they lean one way or the other, and (3) bipolar rating scales with seven points yield measurement accuracy superior to that of three-, five-, and nine-point scales.

NEIL MALHOTRA is with Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. JON A. KROSNICK is with Departments of Communication, Political Science, and Psychology, Stanford University, 434 McClatchy Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. RANDALL K. THOMAS is with Survey Research Center, ICF International, 9300 Lee Highway, Fairfax, VA 22031, USA. Jon Krosnick is a University Fellow at Resources for the Future. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. We thank panel participants as well as anonymous reviewers for valuable advice and feedback.


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