Measuring with sliders

Opinion polls are a key instrument in research on political behavior and are increasingly being conducted on screens such as mobile phones and computers. An often overlooked aspect of survey design is the visual design, which has been shown to affect respondents' answers. This article explores the effects of minor visual changes to a self-placement survey slider on the left-right political scale. This has substantial implications for social science research, as the political left-right scale is a widely used variable for political behavior research. Our experiment explores between-subject variations of four different visual treatments for a political left-right self-placement response slider. The experiment was fielded in the Norwegian Citizen Panel (NCP) to 11,925 respondents.