Ask HN: Tools or mental model for answering subjective questions quantitatively?
I'm interested in tricks, tools, or mental models to help answer subjective questions with accuracy and precision (and eliminate biases).
For example, how do you turn the following questions into insightful, actionable data?
- How much does this hurt?
- How much do you like this product?
- What are you feeling right now?
Backstory:
I'm 28 and I developed tinnitus out of nowhere a few months ago (I don't go to concerts, I don't sit in server rooms, etc).
It's "mild" to "moderate" right now, I'm terrified of it getting "worse" as I age. I'd like to track it over time (months, years) to see if it gets quantitatively worse.
The issue: it's really hard to
1) control for all environmental variables (sleep, exercise, diet, etc), and
2) answer the question "how bad is it right now?" with consistency (i.e. however bad it is today, I will also give that same response when it is also that bad n days from now)
At first, I recorded (twice daily) my answer to the question:
Scale 1-10 how bad is it right now?
But then I realized - what if it's just not there at some point? I could do mental gymnastics and normalize it so that 1 corresponds to not there but it seemed easier to add 0 to make it 0-10.
But then, when the question became
Scale 0-10 how bad is it right now?
I realized I had no visceral, high-fidelity understanding of what a 3 was, nor a 4, etc.
So I shrank it to 0-5
(I think I'm sacrificing granularity for precision?)
Now, it's easier to assign a number to a subjective experience, but it got me thinking:
This is interesting from a customer / product research perspective and from a scientific research prospective. How do you phrase survey questions to maximize accuracy and precision? Is there a tradeoff? I'd love resource recommendations for studying this idea.