Surveys, Experiments, and the Psychology of Self-Report

This chapter discusses the surveys, experiments, and the Psychology of Self-Report. Assessments of consumers attitudes and preferences are a key component of most consumer surveys and experiments. In opinion surveys, information is gathered from a sample of individuals by asking questions with the goal of characterizing the distribution of opinions in the population. Properly designed surveys allow inferences from a sample to a specified population within a known margin of error. Unfortunately, implementing experiments in representative surveys limits experimentation to manipulations that can be delivered in an interview or online format. Not surprisingly, face-to-face interviews are the most expensive mode of data collection, and, in developed countries with sufficient phone or internet coverage, most surveys are conducted by phone. Since then, psychologists and survey methodologists have drawn on theories of language comprehension, memory, and judgment to formulate explicit models of the question-answering process, testing their implications in tightly controlled laboratory and survey experiments.