Can we please just all agree that blank = zero?
Greenfield, unsurprisingly:
Come on, guys. Stop making things hard for respondents. It’s not like you have enough of them to begin with.
Zebra Bites- And now, the bedrock… August 4, 2010I’ve heard a few times now – from some within (and some flirting on the edges of) our industry – that market researchers need to stop focusing on research methodology so much. There are two main ‘reasons’ put forward here; First, that methodological considerations are so elementary that we don’t need to talk about them [...]
- And now, the bedrock… August 4, 2010
- Market Research Deathwatch
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- Voice of Vovici
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
From a programming point of view, leaving things blank can be problematic. It’s easier to validate if the respondent has to give an answer in each box. I agree though that this question could be better designed. If the number of children in each age band is important, I would have gone with a drop-down box defaulting to zero going up to 10, along with an option for ‘I have no boys / girls’. If it’s not, a tick box for each age / gender to say ‘yes, I have at least one child in this category’ would suffice.
This is just lazy/rushed scriptwriting. Yes it’s easier this way but they should have just gone the length of auto-recoding 0 in all fields left blank by the respondent.
Yea “Mark it zero!” automatically, like ubo.rio says.