Research into cognitive aspects of survey response has indicated unfamiliar terms as one of the psycholinguistic determinants of question comprehensibility problems. In this paper the estimates of wording familiarity based on text corpora for the English and Slovenian languages were used to detect potentially incomprehensible wordings in two web survey questionnaires for international exchange students at the University of Ljubljana, one for incoming (English) and the other for outgoing students (Slovenian). Two versions of the questionnaire were developed for each language, one with low-frequency (complex) and the other with high-frequency (improved) wordings, and compared in a split-ballot experiment. The results show a lower drop-out rate and a decreased subjective perception of difficulty for the improved language versions.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33807709
When the initial distribution and transition rates for a continuous time Markov chain are not known precisely, robust methods are needed to study the evolution of the process in time to avoid judgements based on unwarranted precision. We follow the ideas successfully applied in the study of discrete time model to build a framework of imprecise Markov chains in continuous time. The imprecision in the distributions over the set of states is modelled with upper and lower expectation functionals, which equivalently represent sets of probability distributions. The second part of the paper is devoted to numerical methods for approximating the boundary solutions. The methods are based on discretisation of the time interval.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33283165
The article named Investigating respondent multitasking in web surveys using paradata focuses on “respondent multitasking (RM) in web surveys. RM occurs when users engage in other activities while responding to a web survey questionnaire.” The added value of the article is in “a new approach for measuring RM in web surveys, which involves an innovative use of the different types of paradata defined as non-reactive electronic tracks concerning respondents' process of answering the web questionnaire”. This approach was tested in empirical research with 267 students. The results show that 56 % of the respondents were performing multitasking. This article represents a significant contribution to automation of web survey process.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33672285