The Debate: When Do Comparative Symbols Belong in a Questionnaire?
Published Wednesday, February 25, 2026—3 minutes read
One seemingly simple survey question was enough to turn a routine discussion into a debate over something we thought would be obvious.
Back when I was part of the Students Legislative Council of Telkom University, we hit a strange roadblock while putting together a survey. We got into a heated discussion about which comparison symbol should be used for student entry years. Half of us defended one approach, while the other argued for the opposite. We were designing a research instrument but got stuck on a seemingly simple symbol. Can you believe it?
This problem is more common than it seems because survey designers often struggle to determine when symbols like “less than” or “greater than” are appropriate. Using these symbols incorrectly creates misunderstandings and leaves respondents unable to answer the question. To figure out the right way to handle this, I conducted research to examine how comparison symbols relate to different data types.
The Findings
In the study, we looked into four specific types of data, namely nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio data. The real troublemaker for our debate was nominal data in particular. This type of data is only used to classify certain objects. For example, student entry years are just categories. During our debate, I argued that the class of 2012 was “greater” than 2013 because those students had completed more semesters. The other side argued that the number 2012 is mathematically smaller than 2013 in numerical terms.
It turned out that we were both looking at the problem from the wrong perspective. You cannot use “less than” or “greater than” symbols for these categories at all. Both perspectives in our debate were incorrect because those comparison symbols don’t belong there.
The solution is actually incredibly simple. Instead of trying to use mathematical symbols, you just write the options out in explicit text. This makes the intended meaning clearer without forcing respondents to interpret a comparison that does not apply to the data.
Beyond the Debate
The original questionnaire had already been completed by the time I conducted the study, so there was nothing left to revise. What mattered was having a clearer answer for the next time I had to design a questionnaire and encountered a similar situation. A small disagreement over a symbol had turned into a useful reminder that even minor choices in a research instrument deserve to be grounded in the type of data being represented.
The study itself was small, but its purpose was equally practical and directly applicable. I wanted to understand how concepts from data measurement should translate into the wording of an actual questionnaire, rather than relying on what seemed intuitively correct. That distinction is easy to overlook when a question appears simple enough to answer without much thought or careful consideration.
Since then, I have kept that principle in mind whenever I design a new questionnaire. Sometimes, the clearest way to communicate a relationship is to remove the notation altogether and state what the respondent actually needs to understand in the question.