The Effects of Offering a Middle Response Option with Opinion Questions

Abstract

A frequently encountered consideration in the construction of social survey opinion questions is whether respondents should be offered the choice of a middle response option that states a neutral response. This paper reports the results of six split-ballot tests in each of which a random half of the sample was offered the middle option and the other half was not. As in many earlier studies, the explicit offer of the middle option was found substantially to increase the proportion of respondents expressing a neutral response. An analysis of whether the size of this effect differed according to the socio-demographic subgroup of the respondent found few such interactions to be significant.