RESPONSE LATENCY VERSUS CERTAINTY AS INDEXES OF THE STRENGTH OF VOTING INTENTIONS IN A CATI SURVEY

This CATI study compares two measures of attitude strength, accessibility and certainty, for the purpose of predicting discrepancies between voting intentions and voting behavior. Accessibility was indexed by response latency to a voting intention question and certainty by a question about the finality of the voting intention. Logistic regression showed response latency to be a better predictor of discrepancies between voting intentions and voting behavior than certainty. The theoretical implications of this finding as well as the practical implications of a method for measuring response latencies in CATI election studies are discussed.