The first and most fundamental rule of the construction of guidelines and questionnaires is that people can only respond to what effectively have an opinion or a memory is formed.
It makes No sense to ask questions about specific aspects in which the people have not formed an opinion or don’t remember it that way (For example, think of questions of habits: how much time watching TV in the week?, now if the habit is daily, the possible response -with everything inaccurate that can be – corresponds to the regularity of that habit. What the person may know is as soon as you see the day. The other thing has to be calculated, and, of course, that the people calculate how much they are responding to is not much.
Now the above, although several times forgotten, it is evident and known.
But the important thing is to realize the equivalent or qualitative relation to the opinion: That is only the opinion spontaneous is the opinion real social. The answer ‘forced’ (when the topic is a question without that has been installed by the interviewee, when the researcher introduces the topic), in reality does not exist. Is built, ‘calculated’ at that time; the interviewee what that does is simply reproduce the opinion that occurs in normal social situations. And it may well be that the situation forced that to be your opinion, but of course, never ran into that situation in real life, so you don’t have a lot of importance.
The only occasion in which such forced sense is when I forced it corresponds to a real situation of those features: such As voting, in which the unreal is to ask which candidate you prefer, what is real is that one chooses between alternatives pre-existing. In that case, the question is forced, the alternative forced is the right thing because it is as well as works that social practice (*).
But outside of those cases, it is best to remember and think that, in reality, only the spontaneous exists.
(*) I swear that is the only Ibanez that I find makes sense.