ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

The literature on questionnaire design provides clear principles for improving the measurement of attitudes. Yet, the field lacks consensus on how to resolve persistent challenges, such as the vulnerability of questions to context and wording effects and the accurate capture of attitude strength and complexity. This session seeks contributions describing research designed to clarify unresolved issues such as these and refine current practice.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Question Formats: Evaluations of Agree–Disagree, item-specific, forced-choice, open-ended, branching, and non-traditional response scales, focusing on their relative trade-offs and measurement properties.

• Attitude Strength & Complexity: Measuring dimensions of attitude strength (knowledge, intensity, certainty), as well as ambivalence, nonattitudes, and conditional views (e.g., "it depends").

• Wording and Context Effects: Research examining framing, tone, question-order, item-position, and response-order effects, along with design strategies to reduce these types of effects.

• Pretesting Methodologies: Innovations in cognitive interviewing, web probing, AI-assisted or LLM pretesting, and usability testing.