2. INTRODUCTION
We are investigating whether providing additional information
creates a response bias. We choose this question because we
wanted to find out how extra information in the question will
af fect our subjects’ answers.
We are asking a control question, and also a question that
includes false additional information:
Would you consider getting a large visible tattoo? (control)
Studies have shown that people with many tattoos are 65% less likely to
be hired for a job. Would you consider getting a large visible tattoo?
3. HYPOTHESIS
if a student is given the question with additional
information, then s/he will be more likely to give us the
biased answer. That is, when we include the “negative”
information about tattoos and how they af fect the working
force, and then ask afterwards whether the individual would
consider getting a tattoo, we should expect that the response
will also be biased in that manner, resulting in a “negative”
answer, like no.
4. METHODS
We obtained our subjects in a non -biased manner by randomly
selecting 50 students out of all and only 12 th grade students at
Tucson High School. Unfortunately, our randomization is limited
due to the fact the senior class of approximately 600 students is
much too large to actually be put and drawn from a hat.
We asked the first random 25 individuals the controlled question
during lunch and recorded results. Then we asked the following
25 individuals the question with additional information during
the same lunch and recorded the results.
We will incorporate good principles for this survey by being
familiar with our question, knowing what our objectives are, and
how much information we need. This will give us accuracy and
relevancy. Only asking the senior class composed of almost 18 or
18 year olds will eliminate the variable of a student being too
young. Other variables to be avoided will be stereotypes and
gender association eliminated by randomization.
6. DISCUSSIONS & CONCLUSIONS
We can see that asking our question with additional
information creates a response bias. By asking this question
we found that people are more inclined to say no because of
the negative information added.
Next time we would ask a lot more individuals instead of
5o, we would ask around 150-200. This would help us insure
that the trend we see here is true.
