This is for my psychometric instructors. (Glorious, beloved) Pew Research Center compared participant behavior when they have to answer the same question in either a) forced-choice or b) check-all format. Here are the links to the short report and to the long report . What did they find? Response options matter, such that more participants agreed with statements when they were in the forced-choice format. See below: So, this is interesting for an RM class. I also like that the short report explained the two different kinds of question responses. The article also explores a variety of reasons for these findings, as well as other biases that participants exhibit when responding to questionnaires:

This NPR story is about a survey conducted by the folks at Sesame Street. And that survey asked parents and teachers about kindness. If kids are kind, if the world is kind, how they define kindness, etc.. The NPR story is a round about way of explaining how we operationalize variables, especially in psychology. And the survey itself provides examples of forced choice research questions and dichotomous responses that could have been Likert-type scales. The NPR Story: The Children's Television Workshop, the folks behind Sesame Street, have employees in charge of research and evaluation (a chance to plug off-the-beat-path stats jobs to your students). And they did a survey to figure out what it means to be kind when you are a kid. They surveyed parents and teachers to do so. The main findings are summarized here . Parents and teachers are worried that the world isn't kind and doesn't emphasize kind. But both groups think that kindness is more important than academic a...