A survey is designed to explore the participants’ opinions, attitudes and actions towards certain topics. The amount of information possessed by participants is not the only factor that influences their willingness to participate; question types and options design also influence participants’ responses. In reality, given cost constraints and questionnaire length, it is not feasible to provide a multiple survey design for a single concept, or to verify participants' response mode under different survey designs. This study used an experimental design to measure political knowledge from Taiwan’s Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) as an example, based on (1) an “open-ended vs. close-ended” question design; (2) whether it provides “non-response” as an option, to design four different types of surveys. The study uses a posttest-only control group design with university students as participants. We randomly released the questionnaires to participants and had 1,110 valid questionnaires.

The study found that question type and non-response design affects the participant response mode; a close-ended questionnaire design does increase the correct response ratio from participants, but it also produces a higher proportion of incorrect answers than an open-ended questionnaire. An openended questionnaire design does not have options as reference, and so it could lower the willingness of participants to take part in the survey, and it therefore resulted in a higher non-response ratio. From the composite design of question type and non-response option, we were able to precisely estimate types of participants as in Mondak (1999), but the combinations of different types of participants vary significantly as results from the level of difficulties in a questionnaire designed to measure political knowledge.

This paper aims to study the gender difference on political knowledge from a measurement perspective. It asks if the gender difference becomes smaller when the questionnaires are more related to female essentials, and it further examines the factors that lead to gender difference. By using survey data from the TEDS2013, this paper breaks down the concept of political knowledge into three categories: knowledge of female politicians, knowledge of political institutions, and overall political knowledge. Based on the results from multiple regression models, the findings are clear that males have a better political knowledge than females in general. Females, however, demonstrated a better performance on the knowledge of female politicians. This shows an increasingly clear pattern of female political knowledge when the questionnaires are more closely associated with female essentials. The factors that lead to gender differences include the level of education, exposure to newspapers, political interest, marital status, and the degree of satisfaction with the president’s performance. People with a higher level of education, with more exposure to newspapers, with a greater degree of political interest, those who are married, and express less satisfaction with the president’s performance display higher political knowledge.