GESIS Pretest Database: Documentation Questions Details - FGZ Cohesion Panel: Wave 2 – Questions on climate change, antisemitism, and gender equality (English Version)

General Information:

*Note: The item was tested in German. This is an English translation of the original German wording.

Question Text:

Has the impairment increased, decreased, or stayed the same over the past 5 years?

[Hat die Beeinträchtigung in den letzten 5 Jahren zugenommen, abgenommen oder ist sie gleich geblieben?]

Answer Categories:

Strongly decreased [Stark abgenommen]
Rather decreased [Eher abgenommen]
Remained the same [Gleich geblieben]
Rather increased [Eher zugenommen]
Strongly increased [Stark zugenommen]

Recommendations:

To clarify the context of the question, we recommend repeating the reason for the impairment again in the question text:

Has the interference at your place of residence by infrastructures (e.g. highways, railroad tracks, power lines) increased, decreased or remained the same in the last 5 years?)

Cognitive Techniques:

Difficulty Probing

Findings for Question:

Question 7 was asked only of those respondents who had selected a scale value of 0 to 10 in question 6. The majority of subjects (75 %) indicated that the impairment caused by the infrastructures men-tioned in question 6 had remained the same over the past 5 years. Just over one-fifth of respondents (22 %) registered an increase in impairment and just under 3 % a decrease.
The aim of the pretest was to investigate whether the subjects had difficulties answering this question and, if so, what the difficulties were. The corresponding cognitive probes (N1-F7 and N2_F7, see Ap-pendix) were asked of the 124 subjects who were (randomly) assigned to Group 1.
About 18 % (n = 22) of the respondents stated that they found it “rather difficult” or “very difficult” to answer question 7. In most cases, this was because this (and the previous question) was a difficult topic that they had not yet dealt with sufficiently.

„It is difficult to name what specifically bothers me and how strongly I rate this. Basically, I am satisfied, but the disturbing factor of cars is unfortunately everywhere.“ (TP360).
„Because I didn’t think about these questions very strongly before.“ (TP537)

Some respondents (n = 5) cited as a reason that it was unclear which “impairments” they were referring to:

„Because it is not clear what impairments were meant.“(TP311)
„I don’t understand what is meant by impairment, it is worded to broadly.“ (TP361)

Question Topic:

Society & social affairs/ Residing & living

Construct:

Change in undesirable infrastructures