RESPONSE LATENCY AS A SIGNAL TO QUESTION PROBLEMS IN SURVEY-RESEARCH

This research explores the potential utility of response latency as an index of question problems in survey research. The time respondents t ook to answer three types of bad questions was compared to the time th ey took to answer the repaired versions of the questions. Questions co ntaining a superfluous negative and double-barreled questions took lon ger to answer than nearly identical questions without these problems. Repaired versions of questions soliciting frequency estimates, however , took longer to answer than their problematic counterparts. The resul ts are discussed in the context of a model of question answering, and their implications for survey methodology are explored.