UNH Personality Lab
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Psychologists and other researchers employ diverse types of surveys and survey items. Lifespace-type items include questions about a person’s external life conditions and activities, for example, “How many hours did you spend playing video games last week?” and elicit countable responses, for example, 0 hours, < 1 hour, 1-2 hours, 3-5 hours, etc., where the response intervals are referred to as bins. We report on a procedure for creating tailored bins for participants and compare it to two other binning approaches in an original and a replication study (Ns = 263 and 246). The Tailored binning approach developed here is highly structured, but, for convenience, can also be applied in less formal fashions. In the structured form focused on here, it compares favorably with alternative approaches such as Equal Percentage and Equal Interval methods. The pros and cons of each method are described in the Discussion and recommendations are provided.
Publication Date
2-9-2025
Publisher
IDEAS SPREAD
Journal Title
Humanities and Social Science Research
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Angier, D. M., & Mayer, J. D. (2025, February 9). A Comparison of Methods for Binning Responses to Open-Ended Survey Items About Everyday Events: A New Tailored-Binning Approach. Humanities and Social Science Research, 8(1), p32. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.30560/hssr.v8n1p32
Comments
This is an open access article published by IDEAS SPREAD in Humanities and Social Science Research in 2025, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.30560/hssr.v8n1p32