Final Questions

Since I got no comments no this question on the other thread, and I actually came to like it, I am going to re-post one of my original questions here. Please do let me know what you think, I am sure it could use some editing:

"In your opinion, how has Canada's global reputation been affected by its involvement in the war in Afghanistan?" 

possible answers: "positive - showed full commitment to NATO which will benefit Canada in the future", "positive - proved military strength and leadership in world affairs", "it had no effect", "negative - Canada had a part in the murder and torture of innocent civilians", and "negative - the war was too long, cost too much, and hurt Canada's reputation as a peacekeeping nation"

Lee, although I like your question, I think there are a few implications with the answers. In particular, since the "negative" response are connected with "murder of innocent civilians" in addition to mentioning its high costs, people are going to likely provide ideal answers as opposed to how they truly feel. Furthermore, The reasons as to why people might disagree or agree with the question might be different than the choices you have provided. It might be a better idea to leave it as "positive, No effect (neutral) or negative". Let me know what you think! :)

Best wishes,

Nikta

I have to agree with Nikta, we can't risk editorializing the responses. Though we might want to break it down further into "very positively, somewhat positively, neutral, somewhat negatively, very negatively", or something similar.

Nikta, thank you for your feedback! I think you are right and that's why I wanted to hear what other people thought. I guess that on one hand I wanted to find out whether people saw the war as negative or positive in regard to Canada's reputation, and at the same time I was also interested in WHY they thought it was a good/bad thing. But I see how it can be problematic as a survey question - obviously my answers were slightly extreme (though, talking to Canadians about Afghanistan, that's the type of responses I'd normally get, which is why I put them as examples).

ANYWAY, bottom line, I'm going to change the answers to this question, following you suggestion to "positive"/"no effect"/"negative"/"don't know" (which I'll keep including unless someone objects).

Thanks again.

It might be a good idea to try and keep the number of answers the same. So for each question we end up with a scale going from 1 to 5 and potentially a 6 demarcating lack of knowledge.

Lee, in this case your question would have 6 potential answers, basically what Morgan suggested plus your "don't know" option.

Keeping this consistency throughout the survey would allow us to map the data much more easily, which is most likely what we're going to end up doing.

Ari, I don't know if I agree with you on this one. I'll explain: I think deciding to have a certain number of possible answers can really limit us in terms of the kinds of questions we ask. Also, keep in mind other groups are working on other questions for the survey, and from what I've seen some are as simple as "true/false". The way I see it, restricting ourselves to a certain type of questions would just make the survey a bit less interesting, but I'm curious to hear how you think it would help with mapping the data at the end, since it imght be something I have't thought of. I don't mind the changes regarding my question in particular, and in fact that might be a good idea. I just don't think we should insist on 6 potential answers as a general rule.

Good point Lee, I guess we are going to end up combining the survey with all the other teams and that would mean that we will have to make quite a few scale conversions for in order to properly map the answers. However, consistency even just within our foreign policy section, should allow for a much more simplified amalgamation of data and thus more clear results.

But, my insistence aside, it does appear as though we have already moved towards a 5(+1) answer scheme.

However, I fully agree that we shouldn't restrict ourselves to this model. If we really need to change the answer options for one or more of the questions then sure, we should go ahead and do that.