IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29686.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Eliciting People's First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions

Author

Listed:
  • Beatrice Ferrario
  • Stefanie Stantcheva

Abstract

This paper illustrates the design and use of open-ended survey questions as a way of eliciting people's first-order concerns on policies. Multiple choice questions are the backbone of most surveys, but they may prime respondents to select answer options that they would not naturally have thought about, and they may omit relevant options. Open-ended questions that do not constrain respondents with specific answer choices are a valuable tool for eliciting first-order thinking. We discuss three text analysis methods to analyze open-ended questions' answers. To illustrate how to apply these methods, we provide evidence from large-scale surveys on income and estate taxation. We show the that key concerns relate mostly to distribution issues, fairness, and government, rather than to efficiency concerns. There are large partisan gaps in the first-order concerns on policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Beatrice Ferrario & Stefanie Stantcheva, 2022. "Eliciting People's First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions," NBER Working Papers 29686, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29686
    Note: EFG LS PE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29686.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Demgensky, Lisa & Fritsche, Ulrich, 2023. "Narratives on the causes of inflation in Germany: First results of a pilot study," WiSo-HH Working Paper Series 77, University of Hamburg, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, WISO Research Laboratory.
    2. Jiang, Lingqing & Zhu, Zhen, 2022. "Information exchange and multiple peer groups: A natural experiment in an online community," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 203(C), pages 543-562.
    3. Sebastian Link & Andreas Peichl & Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2023. "Attention to the Macroeconomy," ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series 256, University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany.
    4. An, Zidong & Binder, Carola & Sheng, Xuguang Simon, 2023. "Gas price expectations of Chinese households," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    5. Tobias Wekhof & Sébastien Houde, 2023. "Using narratives to infer preferences in understanding the energy efficiency gap," Nature Energy, Nature, vol. 8(9), pages 965-977, September.
    6. Quentin Lippmann & Khushboo Surana, 2022. "The Hierarchy of Partner Preferences," Discussion Papers 22/08, Department of Economics, University of York.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29686. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.