Destination Image Questionnaires: The Trial of a 'Don't Know' Option

Since the first destination image studies were published in the early 1970s, the field has become one of the most popular in the tourism literature. While reviews of the destination image literature show no commonly agreed conceptualisation of the construct, researchers have predominantly used structured questionnaires for measurement. There has been criticism that the way some of these scales have been selected means a greater likelihood of attributes being irrelevant to participants. This opens up the risk of stimulating uninformed responses. While the issue of uninformed response was first raised as a source of error 60 years ago, there has been little, if any, discussion in relation to destination image measurement. This paper reports the trial of a non-response option in a destination image questionnaire. It is suggested the use of a 'don’t know' option provides participants with an alternative to skipping the question, using the scale midpoint to denote neutrality, or providing an uninformed response.