An Analysis of Surveys to Determine the Effectiveness of Bias in Question Wording as a Method of Skewing Reported Opinions

Clear and unbiased question wording is important to obtaining consistent and accurate survey results. However, if the goal is not to obtain accurate results but instead to obtain a specific result, then altering question wording may be effective. To examine this possibility, we created a survey with 9 different versions of a question, one being an unbiased control and the rest being intended to skew the results a particular way. The results show that while the question wording does indeed matter, the exact impact is harder to manipulate. While the results fail to demonstrate that survey results can be consistently skewed a particular way, they do demonstrate that it is feasible to skew results using these methods. Key Words: statistics, statistical analysis, data, surveys, web surveys, public opinion, polling, question wording, MTurk, bia

Local government expenditures in Belgium: do political distinctions matter

The purpose of this paper is to test whether public spending by local communities in Belgium is influenced by local politics. Unlike previous studies which are briefly surveyed, we test alternative models of the local budgetary decision, and systematically favour the one which includes political variables. In spite of this deliberate bias, political factors influence neither the level nor the structure of local public spending in Belgium. This may imply little differentiation among parties at the local level, rather than institutional constraints. Copyright © 1981, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reservedSCOPUS: ar.jFLWNAinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe