Effects of Questionnaire Length on Response Quality

A response tendency resulting from the length of a group-administered questionnaire instrument is described. Respondents answering items that are included in large sets toward the later parts of a long questionnaire are more likely to give identical answers to most or all of the items, compared with those responding to items in smaller sets or in shorter questionnaires. While means and intercorrelations among items within the same set are affected by this “straight-line” response pattern, intercorrelations between items from different sets are much less affected by it. These investigations are based on comparisons between a long questionnaire, administered to 1,050 high school seniors in nine high schools across the nation in 1978, and five shorter questionnaires administered to large national samples of high school seniors.