TY - JOUR AU - Saris, Willem AU - Revilla, Melanie AU - Krosnick, Jon A. AU - Shaeffer, Eric M. PY - 2010/05/01 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Comparing Questions with Agree/Disagree Response Options to Questions with Item-Specific Response Options JF - Survey Research Methods JA - SRM VL - 4 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.18148/srm/2010.v4i1.2682 UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/2682 SP - 61-79 AB - Although Agree/Disagree (A/D) rating scales are hugely popular in the social sciences, a large body of research conducted during more than five decades has documented the bias that results from acquiescence in responses to these items. This may be a reason to prefer questions with Item Specific (IS) response options, but remarkably little research has explored whether responses to A/D rating scale questions are indeed of lower quality than responses to questions with IS response options. Using a research design that combines the advantages of a random assignment between-subjects experiment and the multitrait-multimethod approach in the context of representative sample surveys, we found that responses to A/D rating scale questions indeed had much lower quality than responses to comparable questions offering IS response options. These results attest to the superiority of questions with IS response options. ER -