2nd Jun, 2008

How many people will reveal income? About three quarters..

Description of experiment: We wanted to find out how many people will, when forced to respond, provide an honest answer to the question “How much do you earn”.

Background: We surveyed 1263 people and we asked them all to provide their income in an open question. The exact question and instruction was “What is your personal annual income, before tax in $USD? [Please enter only numbers and not words]”
This is quite a sensitive topic and it’s perceived that many people do not like to answer.

Results: In this survey, 76% of people gave an answer that looks true, whilst 24% refused or gave answers that were rather confusing or ambiguous.

  • 0.6% wrote in NA
  • 8.0% wrote in the number “0″ indicating their pay may be zero (they could be retired), or possibly indicating they do not want to reveal anything.
  • A further 1.1% wrote in the number “1″ - and it’s unlikely they earn $1, so I figure this is a form or refusal.

  • 3.3% refused to answer and wrote in symbols or characters.
  • 0.4% wrote in something pretty confusing and esoteric
  • It was possible to write in numbers or text, though the instruction was to write in numbers only. 93.9% wrote in numbers whilst 6.1% wrote in text responses
  • 82.8% wrote in an answer with the 000s included but 17.2% did not, making their answers ambiguous or not usable.

    Commentary: In summary it looks like about 25% of the data is not reliable.

    This is actually not bad. Normally when we offer an option of “Rather not say”, we get about 25%-35% selecting it. In future we will revert to this because, although we’ll lose a little data, we just think it’s a bit more elegant to give respondents the clear option to opt out of answering intrusive questions.

    • Posted by: BlowFly

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