Ranges given instead of exact values in survey I gave a survey wherein one data there is stated as to how often do individuals watch tv in a day. I was hoping to get exact values from the individuals but some of them put ranges like 1-5 times in a day. Given that, how can I get the average of the data? Should I average each ranges? Thanks in advance  
 A: There are several questions to keep in mind in designing each question on a survey:


*

*Does the subject understand the question?

*Does the subject know the answer?

*Is the subject willing to reveal the answer?
Maybe the people who put 1-5 times a day don't understand
what you mean by 'times' a day. If a 3 hour movie is
interrupted a couple of times to fix snacks, is that 'once'
or 'three times'?
If you want a personal average, maybe the subjects don't
know. They'd need to keep records and do the averaging for
themselves.
Maybe some people who watch what they think may be a little too
much TV don't want to admit that they don't have better things
to do.
It might be better to ask, "How many hours did you happen to spend watching
TV yesterday?" and then give intervals for hours, such as 'less than 1',
between 1 and 2', and so on. With luck, they will remember yesterday.
And if they wasted the day binge-watching a crummy series for 11 hours, they might be
willing to say so; they're only admitting to behavior for one day.
Frequently, when you don't get the information you wanted from
a survey it is the fault of the survey. There are no statistical
magical tricks for retrieving information from a botched survey.
