Questionnaires: Collection of Subjective Expectations Data

Questionnaires are used to elicit from individuals a broad array of objective information as well as subjective information about their thoughts and perceptions. This article focuses on a single topic about questionnaires - how to elicit respondents' subjective expectations of future events. Subjective expectations are being measured with increasing frequency, yet the social and behavioral sciences have not formed a common view on how expectations should be conceptualized and measured. A particularly intriguing controversy, described in this article, concerns the relative merits of verbal and probabilistic forms of questioning.