But which people and who defines them?" Finely balanced questions such as these, as well as numerous others, including the reliability of memory, the mystery of close relationships, the business of establishing personal morality and responsibility, how to contend with the power of love and the prospect of death – the whole kit and caboodle, in other words – recur throughout Barnes's work.
The recent independent media polls conducted by ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Gallup, which found strong support for repeal, "asked simple, balanced questions that produced a more trustworthy result," he said.
Writing a balanced question, especially one that is not so long that the respondent hangs up in the middle, is a difficult art, not a science.
Kay Callison, Columbia, Mo.: Good on you, Paul Krugman Wolff Blitzerr got positively flustered a few weeks back when Howard Dean replied to Blitzer's balanced question about the Abramoff scandal with a simple statement that there is no democratic involvement in this matter.
In true Cavuto fashion he used that tiny piece of punctuation to turn a loaded statement into a "fair and balanced" question.
Echoing the assessment of some aviation industry analysts, Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence, an aviation Web site, said that "it will be a finely balanced financial question whether to do these modifications or not".
Javid, who during the election campaign questioned whether the BBC "could have done a more balanced job", sidestepped questions during the interview about whether he personally favoured getting rid of the licence fee, saying it was a matter for charter review.
Howard Archer, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, reckons the governor and colleagues were actually "pretty balanced", on the question of when rates might rise.
This ensured a balanced scope of knowledge questions as well as ensured appropriateness and comprehensiveness of the questions in the local context.
Having identified the presence of acquiescent responding, we test three methods for mitigating this response bias: the use of balanced scales, item-specific questions, and statistical correctives.
