Details
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 872-890 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society |
| Volume | 185 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 22 Feb 2022 |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Abstract
The rapid increase in smartphone surveys and technological developments open novel opportunities for collecting survey answers. One of these opportunities is the use of open-ended questions with requests for oral instead of written answers, which may facilitate the answer process and result in more in-depth and unfiltered information. Whereas it is now possible to collect oral answers on smartphones, we still lack studies on the impact of this novel answer format on the characteristics of respondents' answers. In this study, we compare the linguistic and content characteristics of written versus oral answers to political attitude questions. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in a smartphone survey (N = 2402) and randomly assigned respondents to an answer format (written or oral). Oral answers were collected via the open source ‘SurveyVoice (SVoice)’ tool, whereas written answers were typed in via the smartphone keypad. Applying length analysis, lexical structure analysis, sentiment analysis and structural topic models, our results reveal that written and oral answers differ substantially from each other in terms of lengths, structures, sentiments and topics. We find evidence that written answers are characterized by an intentional and conscious answering, whereas oral answers are characterized by an intuitive and spontaneous answering.
Keywords
- open-ended questions, political attitudes, sentiment analysis, smartphone surveys, structural topic modelling, text data, voice data
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Mathematics(all)
- Statistics and Probability
- Social Sciences(all)
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
- Economics, Econometrics and Finance(all)
- Economics and Econometrics
- Decision Sciences(all)
- Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
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In: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society, Vol. 185, No. 3, 07.2022, p. 872-890.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Innovating the collection of open-ended answers
T2 - The linguistic and content characteristics of written and oral answers to political attitude questions
AU - Gavras, Konstantin
AU - Höhne, Jan Karem
AU - Blom, Annelies G.
AU - Schoen, Harald
N1 - Funding Information: The authors thank Daniel Qureshi (University of Frankfurt) and Stephan Schlosser (University of Göttingen) for their support during data collection. The data collection was funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) through the Collaborative Research Center 884 ‘Political Economy of Reforms’ (SFB 884; project ID: 139943784). We thank the Board of the SFB 884 for supporting our research. Open access funding was enabled and organized by ProjektDEAL.
PY - 2022/7
Y1 - 2022/7
N2 - The rapid increase in smartphone surveys and technological developments open novel opportunities for collecting survey answers. One of these opportunities is the use of open-ended questions with requests for oral instead of written answers, which may facilitate the answer process and result in more in-depth and unfiltered information. Whereas it is now possible to collect oral answers on smartphones, we still lack studies on the impact of this novel answer format on the characteristics of respondents' answers. In this study, we compare the linguistic and content characteristics of written versus oral answers to political attitude questions. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in a smartphone survey (N = 2402) and randomly assigned respondents to an answer format (written or oral). Oral answers were collected via the open source ‘SurveyVoice (SVoice)’ tool, whereas written answers were typed in via the smartphone keypad. Applying length analysis, lexical structure analysis, sentiment analysis and structural topic models, our results reveal that written and oral answers differ substantially from each other in terms of lengths, structures, sentiments and topics. We find evidence that written answers are characterized by an intentional and conscious answering, whereas oral answers are characterized by an intuitive and spontaneous answering.
AB - The rapid increase in smartphone surveys and technological developments open novel opportunities for collecting survey answers. One of these opportunities is the use of open-ended questions with requests for oral instead of written answers, which may facilitate the answer process and result in more in-depth and unfiltered information. Whereas it is now possible to collect oral answers on smartphones, we still lack studies on the impact of this novel answer format on the characteristics of respondents' answers. In this study, we compare the linguistic and content characteristics of written versus oral answers to political attitude questions. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in a smartphone survey (N = 2402) and randomly assigned respondents to an answer format (written or oral). Oral answers were collected via the open source ‘SurveyVoice (SVoice)’ tool, whereas written answers were typed in via the smartphone keypad. Applying length analysis, lexical structure analysis, sentiment analysis and structural topic models, our results reveal that written and oral answers differ substantially from each other in terms of lengths, structures, sentiments and topics. We find evidence that written answers are characterized by an intentional and conscious answering, whereas oral answers are characterized by an intuitive and spontaneous answering.
KW - open-ended questions
KW - political attitudes
KW - sentiment analysis
KW - smartphone surveys
KW - structural topic modelling
KW - text data
KW - voice data
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85125065992&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/rssa.12807
DO - 10.1111/rssa.12807
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85125065992
VL - 185
SP - 872
EP - 890
JO - Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society
JF - Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society
SN - 0964-1998
IS - 3
ER -