The Applicability of the Open-Ended and Multiple-Choice Format for the Measurement of Political Knowledge

• Main Authors: Pan, Sin Yi, 潘心儀
• Other Authors: Tsai, Tsung han
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/03731901200794736442

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 政治學系 === 104 === Political knowledge plays an important role in the democratic society, and therefore there has been much research on political knowledge in the discipline of political science. To study political knowledge, political scientists have to understand the way of questions and options presented, and also the differences between a variety of question formats. This paper aims to analyze which question format is better for measuring the political knowledge of the public. The open-ended and multiple-choice items are both common formats for measuring political knowledge in Taiwan. The open-ended question is always considered to underestimate the respondents’ level of political knowledge, while the multiple-choice format is thought of overestimating the levels of political knowledge for providing the respondents with opportunity to guess. However, a strong evidence to decide the most suitable format for the measurement of political knowledge is still lacking. This paper uses the secondary data which is collected by a pretest-posttest questionnaire to examine whether guessing behavior will emerge or not when the respondents facing the same question with different formats. This research finds that open-ended questions underestimate the respondents’ knowledge levels who has higher level of political knowledge originally, but the multiple-choice questions can estimate the levels more accurately. To further confirm that the higher guess proportions in the more difficult questions are not resulted from the blind guessing, the study examines the probabilities of options selected by Multinomial Probit Model. The research finds that though the respondents may have guess more in multiple-choice question, however, they tend to answer the questions based on their knowledge instead of blind guessing. Therefore, the respondents who have higher levels of political knowledge can guess correctly, while those who have lower levels of political knowledge cannot. In summary, the multiple-choice questions are more suitable to measure people’s political knowledge.