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
