Neutrosophy for Survey Analysis in Social Sciences

Abstract

The survey is a research procedure used in sociology to determine the thoughts and feelings of a social group at a
given time and context. Within the survey, the questionnaire is considered as a very useful instrument used to measure the state
of opinions of social groups. Although it has been demonstrated that fuzzy responses to questionnaires are more appropriate than
crisp ones, there may be indeterminacy and thus fuzzy processing does not accurately capture the thought that the respondent
wants to express, due to doubts, unclear and vague thoughts, among others. Modeling such scenario by means of neutrosophic
sets provides respondents a greater range of possible responses and hence it is more appropriate. In this paper, we propose a
method to design single-valued neutrosophic sets from questionnaires to social groups. This method, inspired by another fuzzy
one, allows us to create membership functions of truthfulness, indeterminacy and falseness through experimental data, which
will let us find the essence of the thought of the human group under study to be captured with greater accuracy.