Conferences

Surveying attitudes, the subject’s answer does not reflect only his actual status, but also: 1) the perception he has of it; 2) his awareness of having a status; 3) reactions to the instrument, affected also by the ability of using it. As a matter of fact, such ability is related to both the subject’s specificities (especially education) and the structure of the instrument itself.

The most used techniques, which are usually also the most analysed through specific methodological researches, are the ones implying the use of “point items” – sentences expressed as an assertion, a question, or an object description – whose formulation clarify only one aspect of the issue investigated through the overall question. Beside the fact that such an instrument is considered affected by several kinds of distortion, a large amount of scientific literature has also shown that it often stimulates mechanical and/or acquiescent answers.

On the contrary, the technique known as the Forced Choice (FC) seems to be an interesting instrument, able to bypass successfully such a problems. In particular, we think that the accurately designed FC, even presenting some difficulties, allows to avoid the acquiescence risk as well as other common distortions.

To support this assumption, in the paper some research findings are presented. In particular, we will compare the FC with one of the most common technique as the Likert scale, showing the FC’s efficacy in the face-to-face interviews, in the web surveys, and in the chat interviews. According to the empirical evidence, the research support the assumption that the indubitable design complexity of the FC, in this work, is largely paid off by its ability to provide more reliable answers and quasi-cardinal variables, which allow complex factorial analysis.