Principle 3: Creating Better Social Issue Questions
Note: This article is part of a series. I recommend reading the intro, principle 1 (part 1 and part 2), and principle 2 before continuing below.
So far in our series, I’ve covered putting questions into context and ensuring that we’re creating samples with intentionality—focusing on building a better representation of a cross-section of the public, rather than ending up with one that’s made up of politically and ideologically skewed, overly engaged individuals that consume a considerable amount of news. (Which, it should go without saying, is not the general public.)
In this article, we will start our discussion about better questions. This topic will take several articles to cover, given the breadth and depth of the potential ways to create better, unbiased and contextualized questions. As I’ve mentioned previously, much of the questions designed in social issue awareness and/or participation/behavioral studies focus on getting a signal for an already baked idea of a campaign or initiative. Most research doesn't really focus on the complexities of the public’s actual awareness and action, but rather on getting likelihood scenarios and participation interests with no real barriers in mind.?
In the next few articles, I plan to cover three important topics on the organization of question and inquiry design. Each of these are important for the development of unbiased questionnaires that put social issues into the context of an individual’s actual experience.
Knowledge: Building questions that understand the education/knowledge or lack thereof of your target audience of a social issue.
Attitude: Creating questions that deepen your understanding of the target audiences’ bias (conscious or non), perceptions or misperceptions, and attitudes toward a social issue.
Behaviors: Crafting questions to understand whether or not participation, action and support for the social issue is likely.
Each of these topics provides a simple flow of social issue design areas of inquiry for many studies—at a minimum, to understand what the target audience or public knows, how they perceive the issue, and their actual willingness to engage with/for the social issue.?
Knowledge: What does the audience know (or not) about the social issue?
The first step after creating an accurate, in-depth screening to fully understand your audience (see my previous articles in this series for more on that), is to gauge their understanding of the issue. What’s key in this important section of any line of inquiry is to get at the real heart of the issue and its various positions/sides. Because the aim of this knowledge section is to not just gauge a person’s understanding, but whether or not the individual fully grasps various positions of the issue as well. In other words, how much do they understand:
Let’s break down each of these.
Issue Definition
It’s important to understand whether or not individuals within the target audience understand the most common definitions of an issue. This can be a challenge when even defining an issue may bring a polarized or negative reaction. We often test whether definitions are acutely representative of their understanding of the issue as well.?
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In understanding what they know about an issue, we will always ask unaided questions, followed by aided questions. In unaided questions, we simply ask the individual to define the social issue and what they know about it. In aided environments, we supply a definition for reaction to see if this is an issue they’ve heard about before, and if this definition accurately or inaccurately represents their understanding. This allows the research team to hear attitudinal responses and/biases, which will be covered in the next article.?
Typical questions include:
Issue Layers
Issues have layers—complexities and various areas that define how the issue is impacted by policy, is a provision of services/offerings for beneficiaries, and impacts populations. It is important to understand whether that knowledge among your target audience is surface-level or goes deeper. By utilizing a segmentation approach to analysis, researchers can understand cohorts or populations within the target audience that need more education or knowledge building.?
Typical questions include:
Issue Positions
Issue positions are an important piece of the Knowledge section—in fact, it's the one where we spend most of our time/allotment on each question battery. Issue position questions allow us to understand if the target audience fully grasps the various sides of the issue, and where the individual stands with each position. This set of questions also help determine how aware the target audience is of the debate and dialogue on the issue.?
We have found that when the target audience is unaware and unfamiliar with the various sides of the issue, it is likely due to news consumption behaviors, a lack of complete understanding of the impacts on people, and/or cultural/familial/economic conditions.
Typical questions include:
Knowledge is the first step in determining what the target audience or public knows about your social issue. Without this full understanding, we cannot expect campaigns to educate the audience in a way that is necessary for proper awareness building efforts.?
In the next article, I’ll focus on attitudinal questions as they relate to social issues. Until then.?