This two-hour course examines survey questions from a psychological
perspective. It covers the basics on how respondents answer survey
questions and how problems in this response process can produce
reporting errors. The class will focus on behavioral questions. The
course is intended as on introduction for researchers who develop
survey questionnaires or who use the data from surveys and want to
understand some of the potential problems with survey data. It
describes the major psychological components of the response process,
including comprehension of the questions, retrieval of information from
memory, combining and supplementing information from memory through
judgment and inference, and the reporting of an answer. The course
has no specific perquisites, though familiarity with survey methodology
or questionnaire design would be helpful.