The most challenging, but also most fascinating tasks for researchers have a very clear and easy to understand problem, but (almost) no solution. This is the reason, why I was very happy to speak about one of the most challenging topics of online research at the GOR conference in Mannheim: the matrix question type.
Probably every researcher would agree, that we need matrix questions for a variety of reasons. At the same time we can identify a lot of quality issues related with this question type, such as non-differentiation or other satisficing behavior.
Curious as ever, we started to look for alternatives at Norstat – some of them standard questions, but also new ways to present a question to the respondent in an appealing way. All this ended up in a little study, where some of these alternatives got compared. Maybe we could not identify a clear winner, but hopefully we could show some ways to enhance questionnaires.
View on Slideshare: Bad Boy Matrix Question – Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? from Florian Tress
Join the discussion! If you have any ideas how to ged rid of the the matrix question type, feel free to get in touch.