Semantic differential questions allow users to illustrate more nuanced feelings about products, people or other concepts.
Rather than just asking a user to rate a product, or the extent to which they agree/disagree with a statement about a product, a semantic differential question allows users to pick a point along a scale between two bipolar adjectives to indicate how they feel. For example, between ‘boring’ and ‘engaging’, ‘unethical’ and ‘ethical’,‘difficult’ and ‘easy’, etc. See an example semantic differential question below:
To add a semantic differential question to your survey, follow these steps:
• Access the Back Room > Research Tools > SurveyMR 2.0.
• Select your survey or click ‘Add Survey 2.0’ in the top right corner of the page.
• In the survey Build tab, add a new question by first clicking and dragging the 'Form' box from the left of the page onto the canvas, or edit an existing form by clicking on the edit icon in the top right corner of the form.
• Open the ‘Add Question’ drop-down menu, and choose ’Semantic Differential Question’.
• Add your question text within the question box provided.
• For each sub-question, add in the two polarised adjectives that you will use as the end labels for each scale range. You can add in as many ranges (sub-questions) as you need.
Tip: For consistency, make sure to have all of the more negative/smaller/etc. polar adjectives on one side of the page and all positive/bigger/etc. polar adjectives on the other side of the page. For example, in the example above ‘boring’, ‘unethical’, and ‘difficult’ are all on the left of the scales, and ‘engaging’, ‘ethical’, and ‘easy’ are all on the right of the scales.
• Set the following:
Answer range –Choose a -/+ range from -1/+1 up to -5/+5.
Polar labels – Set the polar labels for this question, which appear at the top of the list of ranges. For example, you might add ‘More this’, or ‘Strongly describes’, etc. In the example above ‘More this’ has been used as the polar label.
Mid point label – This is an optional setting for which you can add in a mid point label to appear between the polar labels, above the 0-value mid-point of the range. In the example above, ‘Neither’ denotes the respondent has no strong feelings either way. Other examples might include ‘Don’t mind’, ’Not sure’, etc.
Set Randomisation and Validation options, if required.
Click ‘Submit’.