Diamondeye wrote:
That's why there's the regular agree or disagree options and why so many questions have "Sometimes" or other qualifiers, or say things like "more important". Take the punishment vs. rehabilitation. If you think punishment is a lot more important, you put strongly agree, if a little, agree, if you think rehab is more important but not by a lot you put disagree and if a lot then you put strongly disagree.
The last one you cited clearly refers to throughout childhood. Children learn to speak or not touch hot things very early on, but learning to accept discipline takes pretty much all of childhood and sometimes into adulthood.
The questions are not that bad if you answer them as they are and don't mentally edit out qualifiers that make them less absolute.
Yeah, sorry man, I was still editing my post when you replied. I'm not nuts about hardcoding the "sometimes" into the questions either, because again if you think it's wrong in 99.9999% percent of cases, but can possibly in some corner of your mind imagine a case where it's right, an agree/disagree toggle really doesn't work.
It's the same thing that bugs me about the popular personality testing that goes around the corporate environment every five or six years (MBTI, I'm looking at you...) You are forced into generic categories, and if you're right on the border between two categories the results can be inaccurate by quite a few percentage points. I'm guessing each question gets a range on one of the scales from -10 to 10 (or maybe an adjustable range, say a more moderate question from -6 to 8), and they assign a score along that range based where "Strongly Disagree" is one end of the range, "Strongly Agree" is at the other end, and the other two are placed out equidistant along the same line.
That margin of error increases when accompanied by vague statements. If you're going to do multiple choice, the best way to get realistic results is to put forth specific examples in clear terms. Vague statements (using absolutes or not) are no good for accurate polling. They should also use wording that is morally, emotionally, politically neutral, and does not indicate the leanings of the poll creator - ideally the poller objectively uses small factual pieces of information given by the pollee to derive a useful result.
"It's always bad when bad things happen" Agree
Disagree (Poller notes - "This guy like bad things to happen, what a jerk")
Isn't any better than
"It's sometimes good when bad things happen".
Agree (99% of people may pick this, but you didn't gain any useful information from this question)
Disagree (Poller notes - "Closed minded, doesn't think universally")