Reversed questions: the safeguard against automatic answers
Answering forty questions requires attention, and attention falls. Wording half the items the other way round is one of the few protections that work.
The tendency to acquiesce
When a series of statements follows one another, a share of people tend to approve rather than disapprove, independently of content. This inclination, called acquiescence, is reinforced by tiredness, by the length of the questionnaire and by ordinary politeness, which makes agreement more comfortable than refusal.
The problem is that a questionnaire whose statements all go the same way does not make it possible to distinguish a person who approves out of conviction from a person who approves out of automatism. Both produce exactly the same score, and nothing in the result signals the difference.
To this is added a position effect: the last questions of a long questionnaire receive less considered answers than the first. A test that places all the questions of one dimension at the end therefore measures that dimension less well than the others.
The principle of reversal
On the same dimension, part of the statements is written one way and part the other, then the answers to the second set are reversed before being added up. A coherent person approves the first and disapproves the second, which gives a net score. A person who approves everything ends up mechanically in the centre, which is the honest result.
Reversal has a side effect one should know about: answering the same thing everywhere does not produce an extreme profile, but a neutral one. That is logical, and good news for the quality of the measurement, even if it sometimes disappoints the person who answered quickly.
It also makes it possible to spot incoherent answers: when someone approves both a statement and its contrary, the information is valuable. It signals a rapid reading, a real ambivalence, or a misunderstood question, and these three cases deserve to be distinguished.
Precautions in writing
A badly written reversal manufactures noise. Double negatives are to be avoided, because they create errors of understanding that look like inconsistencies of opinion. Good practice consists in wording the opposite position affirmatively, in vocabulary as neutral as that of the original item.
One must also ensure that both sides are equally defensible. If one of the two directions is written in unpleasant terms, the reversal measures reluctance to recognise oneself in a wording, and not the position itself.
What reversal does not do
It does not correct extreme response styles: a person who uses only the ends of the scale remains badly measured, even with reversed items. Nor does it make up for an insufficient number of items.
It does not protect against strategic answering, that of a person seeking to obtain a particular profile. No arrangement really succeeds at that in a voluntary test, and it is more honest to say so than to pretend otherwise.
What this implies for the person answering
Two gestures clearly improve the quality of one's own result: reading each statement to the end, including when it resembles the previous one, and accepting to use the whole scale rather than staying around the centre.
And if a profile seems surprisingly neutral when you feel clear-cut, the first hypothesis to examine is not a flaw in the model: it is the speed at which you answered.
Key points
Without reversed items, approval by conviction cannot be distinguished from approval by automatism.
Answering uniformly then produces a central profile, which is the correct result.
A reversal must be affirmative and as neutral as the original item, otherwise it adds noise.
It protects neither against extreme response styles nor against strategic answering.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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