Comparing Alternative Question Forms for Assessing Consumer Concerns.

Consumer researchers frequently become involved in examining the public's concerns about product safety and other marketplace issues. They seek both to determine the level of concern with particular issues and to learn the characteristics of those who are most concerned. The results of these inquiries can be useful in determining the nature of public concerns and in deciding on public policies to deal with them. The usefulness of past studies, unfortunately, is limited by two sets of problems. One set grows out of failure of most surveys to establish the relevance of survey questions to the respondent. The standard interview format for questions about political, social, and economic issues typically does not allow the interviewer to establish whether a line of questioning is relevant to the respondent before beginning to ask questions (Suchman and Jordan 1990). When a topic is not familiar, responses may be based on the respondents' feelings about an overall issue area rather than actual knowledge. Respondents may, for example, respond to questions about the use of recombinant bovine Somatotropin (rbST) in dairy cattle on the basis of their attitudes about food safety rather than on the basis of their knowledge about the hormone. Researchers need to differentiate concerns that are based solely on such general predispositions from those based on some level of knowledge about a specific hazard. A second group of problems arises from the construction of the conventional question form used to assess the degree of concern: "how concerned are you about. . .?" This question form presupposes that the topic is of concern to the respondent, or seems to suggest to respondents that it should be. The resulting effects can significantly inflate the measures of public concern obtained (Sterngold, Warland, and Herrmann 1994). This paper will consider these two sets of problems and propose question forms which provide alternatives to those used in past research. We, first, will test the effect of an alternative question form designed to reduce the presuppositional effects of the conventional question form: "how concerned are you about. . .?" Second, we will test the effect of an alternative form designed to identify respondents with little knowledge of a food safety hazard. Responses to questions about concern with Salmonella and Listeria contamination of food from a 1995 national survey were used in these comparisons. To test the effects of the alternative question forms, this paper utilized split-sample (or split-ballot) experiments. Such experiments have been used in methodological studies of the effects of alternative survey question forms (e.g., Schuman and Presser 1981). In split-sample experiments, separate, randomly-assigned groups of respondents are subjected to alternative question forms. The effects of these alternative forms on response distributions and on relationships with other variables then can be examined. THE ASSUMPTION OF CONCERN When the common survey question formulation, "how concerned are you about. . ." is used, respondents may try to conform to the sensed presupposition that they are or should be concerned (Sterngold, Warland, and Herrmann 1994). Respondents may conform to this presupposition even when it is inappropriate to do so. In agreeing to be interviewed, respondents agree to go along with the "rules of the game" imposed by the interviewer and with question formats. Schuman and Presser (1981) suggest that in most cases respondents "accept the framework of questions and try earnestly to work within that framework" (299). Presuppositional question forms are a common feature of language. Questions in everyday conversation often contain unstated assumptions about the person questioned. Such presuppositional forms occur frequently in survey questioning. They appear in studies about food safety concerns, e.g. "how concerned are you that the food supply in the United States may be unsafe? …