And an error of omission, which is
when the respondent skips, even so they shouldn't.
The first one is frustrating for the respondent.
Okay?
They get confused, they get questions that don't apply to them.
And it's also annoying for an analyst, because they
don't necessarily know, was the filter question answered correctly
or, whatever the respondent might have ended up putting into the
follow up question, do those really belong to the respondent answers.
The errors of omission, they can't be
repaired even with a judgement call because the
respondent skipped over a section or a segment
of the questionnaire that they shouldn't have skipped.
The result is missing data, and the only thing that you
might have left is imputing the values that should be there.
In general, errors of commission are more common that errors of omission.
At least, that's the result of a research study
by Claire Redline and Don Dillman published in 2002.
Here's a snippet from that study.
You see the control condition and then two other conditions.
One in which they tried to prevent this error,
and one in which they modulated how the skipping
instruction can be enhanced, you know, with this additional
arrow here that leads the respondent to the next question.