title: Does mentioning "some people" and "other people" in a survey question increase the accuracy of adolescents' self-reports?
abstract: A great deal of developmental research has relied on self-reports solicited using the "some/other" question format ("Some students think that… but other students think that…"). This article reports tests of the assumptions underlying its use: that it conveys to adolescents that socially undesirable attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors are not uncommon and legitimizes reporting them, yielding more valid self-reports than would be obtained by "direct" questions, which do not mention what other people think or do. A meta-analysis of 11 experiments embedded in four surveys of diverse samples of adolescents did not support the assumption that the some/other form increases validity. Although the some/other form led adolescents to think that undesirable attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors were more common and resulted in more reports of those attitudes and behaviors, answers to some/other questions were lower in criterion validity than were answers to direct questions. Because some/other questions take longer to ask and answer and require greater cognitive effort from participants (because they involve more words), and because they decrease measurement accuracy, the some/other question format seems best avoided.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94028, USA. dyeager@stanford.edu
authors.forename: David Scott
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Yeager
authors.forename: Jon A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Krosnick
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002140:California; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015201:Meta-Analysis as Topic; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D057566:Self Report; D012919:Social Behavior; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires