How not to write a question
I’m just filling in a medical history form for my new dentist. One of the questions on the form is “Is there any chance you may be pregnant?”. It’s a poor question. There is a chance of me being pregnant: but I’d estimate that chance as being somewhere around 0% (being male tends to keep it around the 0% mark). For someone who is able to bear children and who has been sexually active, that may be higher. The problem with this question is that it is asking for an objective classification of whether there is a non-zero probability of being pregnant. I can’t give such a probability estimation. I have to hold that it may be possible that aliens came down in the middle of the night, abducted me without my knowledge, inserted a womb inside me and made me pregnant, then came down again, made me give birth and then wipe mine and other’s memories of the event. Yes, this is spectacularly improbable and there’s no good reason to believe it. But it is a possibility that I cannot logically rule out, and makes the question unanswerable.
If you want to write this question to get a more accurate response, you should write it as “Do you suspect that you may be pregnant?” Since an objective evaluation of the possibility of pregnancy is rather more difficult than it appears, a question which leans the respondent towards evaluation of their subjective state is a better one.
Another problem with the form: the question ‘Do you drink? (How many) units per week?’ is a difficult one to answer. I don’t not drink, but I don’t drink with any real regularity. I might drink ten units per year. It may be that I go out and have three or four units, two or three times a year. I might share a bottle over a meal. There’s no real easy way of saying that you don’t not drink, but that you don’t drink enough to have a certain amount you can say you drink per week. I have a funny feeling that submitting a form saying 0.1 units per week might not be giving the sort of useful information that a medical practitioner might need. Heh.
I am perhaps nit-picking at this point, but, well, I thought the point of doing a philosophy degree is that it makes you almost totally unable to perform normal, ordinary tasks without nitpicking absolutely everything that anybody says about anything. Mission accomplished then.
When designing forms, please spend more time thinking logically about possible responses, and the existence of irritating people like myself who will take your questions literally.
