Measuring attitudes to work and family: validity in question design

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

This thesis is an investigation into how we currently measure attitudes to working parents. The survey questions used to collect that data include, “Agree or disagree; A preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works”, and “Do you personally agree or disagree…All in all, family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job”. But researchers in this field have concerns that there may be some problems with these questions used to collect this data, particularly that the questions may contain ambiguities and assumptions, and that the questions may contain bias because they imply a certain family arrangement. The study takes six recently used survey questions which are used to measure family and work attitudes in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, and the Household Income Labour Dynamics Australia survey, and asks, “How do respondents understand these survey questions?”, “Do respondents have a consistent understanding of the key terms in the questions?”, and “Can the questions fully capture respondent attitudes to family and work choices?” It uses the qualitative technique of cognitive research to draw out respondents and allow analysis of the understanding that respondents have of the survey questions. Using this data, the core chapters of this thesis address issues of meaning in the survey questions and their constituent words, look for evidence of assumptions within the questions and analyses whether the form of the questions contributes to poor understanding by respondents. The thesis considers if there are issues of bias and oversimplification in survey questions and goes on to discuss whether respondent attitudes can be fully captured by the existing questions. The conclusion offers a set of principles, based on evidence found in this thesis and from other work, for development of improved survey questions.