Effects of Grouping Alternatives on Eliciting More Responses to Check-All-That-Apply Questions (303532)

Keywords: check-all-that-apply format, forced-choice format, web survey

Questionnaires often include check-all-that-apply questions because they place lesser burden on respondents than that placed by forced-choice questions that require respondents to select either applies or does not apply for each item. However, it is known that the check-all-that-apply format usually yields a smaller number of applicable items compared with that yielded by forced-choice format. This presentation shows our attempt to elicit more affirmative responses in the check-all-that-apply format. We first present that the number of applicable items in the check-all-that-apply format is certainly smaller than that in the forced-choice format using some experimental web survey results. Further, we illustrate that more affirmative responses are obtained when the number of alternatives offered in the check-all-that-apply format is small. Therefore, we propose to divide all the alternatives into several groups so that respondents can perceive that the list lengths of each alternative group are shorter than the original full lengths of the alternatives. Experimental web surveys reveal that the method of grouping alternatives elicits more "apply" responses than the method in which the alternatives are not grouped. However, even when the grouping method was employed, the number of applicable items in the check-all-that-apply format was smaller than that in the forced choice format.