In contrast to the previous questions, two non-substantive answer categories were displayed for question 10 in order to give respondents the (explicit) option of leaving the items unanswered. The proportion of respondents who selected the non-substantive response categories "Can't answer" or “Prefer not to answer" was sometimes considerable (see Table 11): For items a and g, their share was about 28 % of responses, and for item h, it was as high as 39 % of responses. Overall, slightly more than half of the subjects (53 %) gave a non-substantive answer for at least one of the items.
In addition, there was no item nonresponse for question 10, that is, all eight items were answered by the 240 subjects. The respondents used the full range of the response scale for all items.
Looking at the substantive response categories ("Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree"), it can be seen that the frequency distributions of items a to d and item f are right skewed, that is, the (large) majority of respondents did not agree (fully/rather) with these statements. For items e and h, about the same number of subjects expressed agreement as disagreement (item e: 33 % vs. 39 %, item h: 19 % vs. 20 %), while item g had more agreement than disagreement (30 % vs. 19 %).
To determine the internal consistency of the 8-item scale, Cronbach's alpha was calculated. This internal consistency was good (cf. George & Mallery, 2002, p. 231), with Cronbach's alpha = 0.86.
The aim of the pretest was to investigate the reason why the subjects selected the non-substantive categories ("Can't answer," "Prefer not to answer"). In addition, the aim was to analyze whether respondents perceived differences between the extreme (items c and h) and moderate items and whether they considered answering these items in surveys to be appropriate. The corresponding cognitive follow-up questions (N1_F10 to N3_F10, see Appendix) were administered to the 116 subjects who were (randomly) assigned to Group 2. Within this group, four subgroups were randomly formed, each of which was to assess two of the eight items in terms of their appropriateness (Group 2a: items a & f, Group 2b: items b & e, Group 2c: items c & g, Group 2d: items d & h).
Reasons for selecting a non-substantive response category
The vast majority of respondents (83 %) justified their non-substantive responses to the items by saying they had not previously thought about the topic and had too little knowledge to express an informed opinion:
Sporadically (n = 4), subjects indicated that they did not want to give reasons for their answers or did not want to disclose their opinions:
Evaluation of the adequacy of statements in a questionnaire.
As shown in Table 12, respondents felt that items a, b, and f were rather inappropriate to answer and items e, h, and g were rather appropriate to answer in a survey. Items c and d were in the middle in terms of ratings. Thus, with the exception of item e, those statements in which Jews are named as a group were rated as more inappropriate than those statements in which Israel's treatment of Palestinians is addressed.
When asked about the reasons why the individual items were perceived as "rather/very inappropriate," the test persons explained that items a, b, and f were racist, antisemitic, or inappropriate in a survey, while for items g and h they argued primarily that they lacked the knowledge to answer the items:
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