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Organizational Research Methods
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What's this?

A Comment on Employee Surveys

Negativity Bias in Open-Ended Responses

Reanna M. Poncheri

North Carolina State University Surface, Ward, and Associates

Jennifer T. Lindberg

North Carolina State University

Lori Foster Thompson

North Carolina State University

Eric A. Surface

Surface, Ward, and Associates

Recent technologies have reduced some of the major barriers to capturing, coding, and analyzing qualitative data from survey respondents. This has prompted a renewed interest in including open-ended questions on employee surveys and a corresponding need to better understand the potential biases of personnel who choose to provide comments. The present study used data from a climate survey (N = 661) to empirically examine qualitative comments and their relationship with quantitative survey ratings. Results revealed that relatively dissatisfied employees were more likely to provide comments than their more satisfied counterparts. Moreover, open-ended responses were disproportionately negative in tone and tended to echo commenters' closed-ended satisfaction ratings. For most survey dimensions studied, the length of comments increased as they became more negative in tone. Finally, the data revealed very few demographic differences between respondents who provided comments and those who did not.

Key Words: open-ended survey responses • comments • organizational surveys • online personnel surveys • negativity bias

This version was published on July 1, 2008

Organizational Research Methods, Vol. 11, No. 3, 614-630 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1094428106295504
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