Response Styles of Structured Questions in Business Research

Abstract

In a scientific research work, a questionnaire is animportant tool for collection of data from potentialrespondents. The most important part of a questionnaire is aquestion. The Questions are generally classified into twocategories: Open ended questions and closed ended question.Open ended questions are called free response questions orunstructured questions and closed ended questions are calledfixed response questions or structured questions. The mainobjective of this paper was to explore the response styles ofstructured questions. There is a range of measurement scalesand response styles that are used during the development of aquestionnaire. Different types of response styles of questionsunder nominal scale, ordinal scale, interval scale and ratioscales were discussed. Generally two types of nominalquestions were found in different research tools i.e.dichotomous and multiple choice questions. Three types ofordinal questions: rank order question, rating scale questionand constant cum question were discussed. Questions relatedto Interval scales and ration scales were also discussed. The fillin the blanks type response style was found in ratio scalequestions. When developing a new research tool, it isimportant to clear which scale and response style to be used.Keywords : Dichotomous question, Multiple choice question,Rank order question, Rating scale question, Interval scalequestions and Ratio scale question.