Research Tips
Let Respondents Say They Don’t Know
When people are asked questions, there’s a natural tendency for them to want to provide answers. While this can be helpful to market researchers, it can also create problems: there’s extensive evidence that people will provide answers to questions about which they have no knowledge or information. For example, a 2002 study found that a majority of the 946 people contacted in a telephone survey and asked questions about brands and organizations provided answers to questions they could not possibly have had answers to since both the brands and the organizations were fictitious.1 As this study and others like it show, one way to reduce this type of guessing is to include a “don’t know” response category.
1 Graeff, Timothy R. (2002), “Uninformed Responses Bias in Telephone Surveys”, Journal of Business Research, 55, 251-259.