With a ‘select all’ format, one loses the information about which are the most important
Have you found that people answer that way? I’ll only tend to answer with more than one option if they’re all about equally important.
You might expect that it’s uncommon for multiple factors to be equally important, I think one of the reasons it is common, in the messy reality that we have (which is not the reality that most statisticians want): multiple factors are often crucial dependencies. Example: A person who spends a lot of their political energy advocating for Quadratic Funding (a democratic way of deciding how public funding is allocated) cannot be said to be more statist than they are libertarian, or vice versa, because the concept of QF just wouldn’t exist and cannot be advocated without both schools of thought, there may be ways of quantifying the role of each school in its invention, but they’re arbitrary (you probably don’t want to end up just measuring which arbitrary quantifications of qualitative dependencies respondants might have in mind today) The concept rests on principles from both schools, to ask which is more important to them is like asking whether having skin is more important to an animal than having blood.
Have you found that people answer that way? I’ll only tend to answer with more than one option if they’re all about equally important.
You might expect that it’s uncommon for multiple factors to be equally important, I think one of the reasons it is common, in the messy reality that we have (which is not the reality that most statisticians want): multiple factors are often crucial dependencies.
Example: A person who spends a lot of their political energy advocating for Quadratic Funding (a democratic way of deciding how public funding is allocated) cannot be said to be more statist than they are libertarian, or vice versa, because the concept of QF just wouldn’t exist and cannot be advocated without both schools of thought, there may be ways of quantifying the role of each school in its invention, but they’re arbitrary (you probably don’t want to end up just measuring which arbitrary quantifications of qualitative dependencies respondants might have in mind today) The concept rests on principles from both schools, to ask which is more important to them is like asking whether having skin is more important to an animal than having blood.