Definition
Acquaintance Response Bias is a character of responses which tend to what respondents are familiar with, e.g., tend to ‘agree’, tend to ‘disagree’, tend to be connected with experiences respondents are familiar with, etc. Sometimes, this type of response is called ‘yes-saying’ response.
Examples of Acquaintance Response Bias
Example 1 is obviously ‘yes-saying’ response.
Example 2 also represents ‘yes-saying’ response. It’s possible that normally a respondent likes going out but there’s few nights s/he lives alone and feels happy. Then, together with ‘yes-saying’ characters, the answers of both questions are ‘Yes’.
Which customer groups do we usually find this kind of bias ?
- Tend to be older age groups
- Lower-educated people, compared to higher ones
- Race & Culture: African, Hispanic, Asia
How to cope with this bias
- Set the benchmark value among respondents with similar profile: For instance, if we’re studying Asian people, we might find that in the previous studies, xx% of Asian people rates score 5 (Totally agree) in 5-scales-agreement-rating questions. However, in this study, less than xx% rates 5. So, it means that agreement degree is still below average.
- Try to provide choices to choose instead of asking ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, ‘Agree’ or ‘Disagree’. For instance instead of asking ‘Do you like going out?’, we can ask ‘Which one do you prefer between going out and living alone at home?’.
- Standardize data: For instance, if we find that satisfaction score rated by Asian people is higher than that rated by European people, provided that Asian people are more likely to be ‘yes-saying’ people, we should standardize data instead of concluding that Asian people are more satisfied than Europen people.
