Nobody wakes up in the morning and says ‘I hope I get to take a survey today!’ Perhaps this is because we usually don’t get immediate returns on our time investment. The researcher collects the data and reviews findings that sometimes are never published and usually never shared directly with each survey respondent. What’s more, we are bombarded with requests for our opinion all the time! We are asked to take surveys on the back of the receipt at the grocery store, on airplanes, after an online banking session--just about everywhere. With so many requests and so little satisfaction yielded by each experience, it’s likely that our motivation to give thoughtful answers is in jeopardy. Indeed, this phenomenon is called satisficing and is well- documented (see, for example: Krosnick, Narayan, Smith, 1996; Krosnick, 2000).
Today, all researches see are survey results. But underneath any mean, there are true answers and satisficed answers, which can pull means in all sorts of directions. Figure 1 below shows this process in theory, whereby the red line is the satisficing group and the blue line is the true group. The purple dotted line shows the average of the two groups. (Illustrative only, not real data.)