Q24 - People who participate in opinion surveys

[rohanw2000]

I picked (E) after eliminating all the other answers but I'm still not convinced how it discusses what the question stem overlooks.

Please correct me if I misunderstood:
Premise: Survey's don't reflect actual views because people often give answers they believe the surveyor expects to hear + in well-constructed surveys, questions are worded in a way that they don't provide indication of the expectation
Conclusion: If its well constructed, respondents desire has no effect....

(E) talks about beliefs that are unfounded. How do views that are unfounded/baseless figure into this argument? Rather, shouldn't this make the answer out of scope?

Could someone tell me what I'm missing or misunderstanding?
Thanks.

[maryadkins]

You nailed the core, good job. And also, good job getting to (E) by process of elimination.

The problem with this argument is that just because questions are designed to hide the questioner's bias doesn't mean that the survey is immune to the problem of people saying what they think the questioner wants to hear. Think of your mom saying something to you, and you read between the lines to hear what she WANTS you to say in response. She may be very careful about her tone. She may be giving you no REASON to think she expects a certain answer. But that doesn't mean you don't think she has a certain expectation and let it influence you.

(E) says this. Even though the tone and word choice of the surveyor is PERFECT, a person completing a survey could still suspect certain expectations and respond to those.

(A) brings in other flaws. Other flaws are out of scope.

(B) brings in people who hold strong opinions. But the conclusion isn't just about these people. It's about all survey respondents.

(C) doesn't affect the argument, because the argument tells you that even if they do have expectations, they're hidden by the well-constructed questions. If they don't even have the expectations to begin with...even better!

(D) says "some" which means just a few (as few as one!). The argument doesn't overlook the possibility of a few people not giving answers based on expectations. It just says "often" this thing happens where they do give answers they think the surveyor expects. And based on this fact, it comes up with a solution.

Hope this helps clarify.

[rohanw2000]

Ah! That makes perfect sense, thank you for a great explanation.

[andrewgong01]

You nailed the core, good job. And also, good job getting to (E) by process of elimination.



(D) says "some" which means just a few (as few as one!). The argument doesn't overlook the possibility of a few people not giving answers based on expectations. It just says "often" this thing happens where they do give answers they think the surveyor expects. And based on this fact, it comes up with a solution.

Hope this helps clarify.

I ruled out "D" for a different reason; not sure if it is a valid reasoning:

"D" is saying that there are people who know what answers the surveyors want but this is not really related to the core of the argument because in the premise we have established that the questions are worded where you will not know what answer is expected and hence "D" is irrelevant since with these good surveys according to the premise you do not have any expectations.

However, by the same above reasoning, it would seem like "E" would need to be ruled out too because the stimulus just said there are no false expectations being created. However, my intuition for going around this is that "E" would support the anti-conclusion by basically saying "we can never remove all expectations because they are always there even for irrational reasons". Moreover, "E" does not contradict the premise because it is offering other explanations/roots of expectations whereas "D" does not give us other explanations/roots of expectations; hence we have to assume under "D"'s paradigm the only expectations would stem from poorly worded questions on a survey

[MaximillianS700]

This argument is a simple hypothetical syllogism with a missing premise. Distilled it looks like:

1. A --> B
---
So, A --> C

The assumption is: B --> C

In other words,

1. If it's a well-constructed survey (A), the people getting surveyed don’t have an indication of what the surveyors expect to hear (B).
---
So, if it's a well-constructed survey (A), then survey respondents’ desire to meet surveyors’ expectations has no effect on the survey’s results (C)

The assumption is: the people getting surveyed don’t have an indication of what the surveyors expect to hear (B), then survey respondents’ desire to meet surveyors’ expectations has no effect on the survey’s results (C).