Abstract
Voting Advice Applications are online tools that provide users with a voting advice based on their answers to a set of political attitude questions. This study investigated to what extent VAA users understand the questions that lead to the voting advice, and what search and response behaviour they expose in case of comprehension difficulties. Two studies were conducted to investigate these issues: a cognitive
interviewing study among 60 VAA users during the Dutch municipal elections in the city of Utrecht, and a statistical analysis of all answers provided by 357,858 users who accessed one of the 34 municipal VAAs during these same elections. Results of the two studies show a coherent picture: difficult concepts (e.g., tax names or municipal jargon), geographical locations (e.g., reference to a specific street), and vague
quantifying terms (e.g., “more”) all complicate the question. In case of comprehension difficulties, Study 1 shows that VAA users make little effort to solve their problems, for example by looking up difficult terms on the Internet. Instead, they draw inferences about what the question might mean and proceed to answer nonetheless. These are often neutral or no opinion answers, which seems to suggest that the meanings of those options are confounded. In Study 2, however, we found that the
choice for either a neutral or no opinion response is not accidental: semantic meaning problems often result in no opinion answers, whereas pragmatic problems are related to neutral responses. We discuss the implications of these findings for survey theory and practice.
interviewing study among 60 VAA users during the Dutch municipal elections in the city of Utrecht, and a statistical analysis of all answers provided by 357,858 users who accessed one of the 34 municipal VAAs during these same elections. Results of the two studies show a coherent picture: difficult concepts (e.g., tax names or municipal jargon), geographical locations (e.g., reference to a specific street), and vague
quantifying terms (e.g., “more”) all complicate the question. In case of comprehension difficulties, Study 1 shows that VAA users make little effort to solve their problems, for example by looking up difficult terms on the Internet. Instead, they draw inferences about what the question might mean and proceed to answer nonetheless. These are often neutral or no opinion answers, which seems to suggest that the meanings of those options are confounded. In Study 2, however, we found that the
choice for either a neutral or no opinion response is not accidental: semantic meaning problems often result in no opinion answers, whereas pragmatic problems are related to neutral responses. We discuss the implications of these findings for survey theory and practice.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 7th International European Survey Research Association Conference |
| Place of Publication | Lisbon Portugal |
| Pages | 125-140 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Publication status | Published - 20 Jul 2017 |
Publication series
| Name | Survey research methods |
|---|---|
| Publisher | European Survey Research Association |
| Number | 2 |
| Volume | 11 |
| ISSN (Print) | 1864-3361 |
Bibliographical note
https://www.europeansurveyresearch.org/Keywords
- voting advice applications
- political attitudes
- comprehension process
- big data