Seeing Through the Eyes of the Respondent: An Eye-tracking Study on Survey Question Comprehension

Asking questions is the predominant method of gathering information about people's values, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and states of affairs. To ensure that the data obtained through surveys are reliable and lead to valid conclusions, respondents must comprehend the questions as intended by the survey designer and find it easy to answer them accurately. Applying a psycholinguistic perspective to survey question design, Lenzner, Kaczmirek, and Lenzner (2010) identified seven text features that undermine reading comprehension and thus increase the cognitive burden imposed by survey questions. In this study, we extend the earlier findings by Lenzner et al. in two ways. First, we use eye tracking as a more direct method to examine whether comprehension is indeed impeded by these text features. Second, we examine whether these text features have different effects for different types of questions. Adapted from the source document.