Often when I work with a client on questionnaire development, I am asked if we should include a neutral point in the rating questions (eg, Very Satisfied, Satisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, Very unsatisfied). Much research has been done in this area, particularly by psychologists concerned with scale development, but no definitive answer has been found and the debate is still ongoing. Some studies find support for excluding it while others for including it depending on the topic, audience, and type of question.
Those against a neutral point argue that by including it, we give respondents an easy way out of avoiding taking a position on a particular issue. There is also the argument that including a neutral point amounts to wasting research money, as this information would not be of much value or, at worst, would distort the results. This field advocates avoiding the use of a neutral point and forcing respondents to tell us which side of the issue they are on.
However, we as consumers make decisions throughout the day and often find ourselves idling in neutral. A neutral point can reflect any of these scenarios:
1. We feel ambivalent about the issue and could go either way
2. We do not have an opinion on the subject due to lack of knowledge or experience
3. We never develop an opinion on the subject because we find it irrelevant
4. We do not want to give our real opinion if it is not considered socially desirable
5. We don’t remember a particular experience related to the issue being rated
By forcing respondents to take a position when they don’t have an opinion about something, we introduce measurement error into the data, as we are not capturing a plausible psychological scenario that respondents may find themselves in. If the goal of the question is to understand variation of opinion, we should not only use a neutral point, but also an “Not sure/Don’t know/Not applicable” option. This would allow respondents in scenarios 2 and 3 to give an answer that is true to their experience.
For example, the other day I received a customer satisfaction survey from Blackberry after a call I made to their support service. The survey had a question asking me to rate the representative who took my call on different aspects. One of them was “Timely Updates: Regular status updates were provided regarding your service request.” I wouldn’t know how to respond to this as the issue I asked for did not require regular updates. Luckily they had the “Not Applicable” option, otherwise I would have been forced to lie, and one side of the scale would be as good as the other.
An increase in non-response and survey dropout may also be due to respondents not wanting to express their opinion due to perceptions of low social desirability. If they are given the “Not sure/Don’t know/Not applicable” option, they are more likely to use it than the neutral point. This would be preferable as they could be excluded from the analysis of a particular question, but the information on other questions would not be lost. An even better alternative is to provide a “I prefer not to answer” option if the question touches on particularly sensitive topics.
Finally, the best antidote to having respondents gravitating towards the neutral point is to make sure that you show the questions to those who can actually answer them. With the help of skip logic, we can design surveys that filter respondents with no experience, knowledge, or interest in the topic being rated. In my Blackberry example, they could have first asked me if my application needed regular updates, and if so, asked me to rate my satisfaction with it. Most likely, the researcher who designed the Blackberry survey was trying to shorten the survey, but still could have introduced measurement error, if he hadn’t seen the “Not Applicable” option at the bottom of the scale, which almost killed him. do. It is not noticeable at first.
You may have already guessed which camp I’m in. Survey questions should be as close as possible to the way respondents would naturally answer them in real life. Sometimes we have to get there in multiple steps by filtering out those who can’t respond, but sometimes we just have to give them the option to be neutral.
