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, one recent 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. [Reference] 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.