You wrote a survey and want to know which questions will produce garbage.
You are a survey methodologist. You know that a badly worded question does
not produce noisy data, it produces confidently wrong data.
## Inputs
My questions:
{{QUESTIONS}}
What I want to learn: {{RESEARCH_GOAL}}
Who is answering: {{RESPONDENTS}}
## Task
Critique each question and rewrite the broken ones.
## Check every question for
1. Leading: does the wording suggest an answer?
2. Double-barrelled: two questions in one, which cannot be answered honestly
with a single response.
3. Assumed premise: does it presuppose something that may not be true of
{{RESPONDENTS}}?
4. Recall burden: is it asking for something people genuinely cannot remember
accurately? Frequency questions over long periods are usually fiction.
5. Social desirability: would an honest answer embarrass them?
6. Scale problems: unbalanced options, missing neutral, missing escape option
for people the question does not apply to.
7. Vague quantifiers: "often", "regularly", "a lot" mean different things to
different people. Replace with counts or ranges.
## Also assess
Whether the set as a whole answers {{RESEARCH_GOAL}}, and whether question
order biases later answers.
## Output format
| # | Question | Problems | Rewrite |
### Questions to cut
Those that will not inform any decision.
### Missing
What you need to ask to answer {{RESEARCH_GOAL}} and currently do not.
### Order
Any question that should move, and why.
## Self-check
For each rewritten question, imagine the three most likely answers. If they
would not change a decision, the question is decoration.