Devographics / Devographics/surveys

New question format: pro/anti likert

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Description

### Problem

With a normal likert scale, the survey designer has to pick a "pro" or "anti" formulation for each question, which risks

1. biasing the results
2. alienating part of the audience as they systematically have to check "disagree"

Example:

- pro: "immigration is net positive for a country"
- bad: "immigration is a net negative for a country"

Image

### Goal

The end goal would be the ability to visualize all responses on a left/right axis, to see at a glance a "blob" of how far along the axis the overall respondent set falls. But that requires a constant left/right scale for every question.

### Idea 1

One idea could be to word each statement in a value-neutral way, such as "immigration: bad/neutral/good". But the issue becomes that the value-neutral formulations are often too vague to let respondents form an opinion. And the more details you provide, the more bias you risk introducing.

Image

### Idea 2

You could also just ask each question twice using both formulations, but that would make the surveys way too long and also be frustrating for respondents.

### Idea 3

Or: each item should randomly switch between pro/anti formulations for each respondent, ensuring the number of pro/anti propositions is always balanced ~50/50.

Then, any "reversed" proposition should also reverse its scale (e.g. "strongly agree" counts the same as "strongly disagree" if the proposition *wasn't* reversed).

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Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are identified in the issue. First map how survey question formats are represented in the YAML configuration, then determine the requirements for balanced pro/anti wording, respondent randomization, reversed scales, and left/right visualization before implementation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
yaml
Domain
content
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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