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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Up Means Good: The Effect of Screen Position on Evaluative Ratings in Web Surveys
Year 2013
Access date 29.07.2011
Abstract

This paper presents results suggesting that respondents use the position of the item on screen as a cue in evaluating the item. People may expect positive things to be higher up on the screen than bad things. We dub this expectation the ―Up means good‖ heuristic. We tested this notion in a series of experiments embedded in four web surveys. The first and third experiments testing this heuristic show that respondents are faster to answer when the positive end of the scale is at the top than when the negative end is; the first experiment also shows that the order of the scale points makes no difference when the scale points are arrayed horizontally. The second, third, and fourth experiments shows that items are rated more favorably when they are positioned near the top of the screen than when they appear lower down on the screen. These experiments vary in how they manipulated the position of the items on screen. Taken together, the studies present further evidence that respondents may rely on incidental visual cues in making judgments as they complete web surveys. Many survey judgments are known to be context-sensitive. The screen position may also be a contextual variable for evaluative judgments in web surveys.

 

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Year of publication2013
Bibliographic typeJournal article
Conferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
Full text availabilityAvailable on request
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Web survey bibliography - 2013 (465)

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