Together with Jesper_Ostman, I'm currently preparing an mTurk surveyon the public perception of extinction threats (aiming for a sample size of about 400). Below is our current draft. Feedback is much appreciated. We are planning to do a few follow-up studies, so in this one we want to keep things simple for the most part. In question 3, we want to compare extinction risk reduction to something that is generally perceived as good but not too closely related to it, but perhaps our current choice isn't the best. In addition to the demographic questions we will also include a brief 10-question personality inventory. We’re both looking for information on the public perception of x-risk and what demographic groups and personality types might have the most potential for getting involved.
1. How likely do you think it is that humanity has gone extinct by the year...
a) 2050 (i) 0-20% (ii) 20-40% (iii) 40-60% (iv) 60-80% (v) 80-100%
b) 2100
(i) 0-20% (ii) 20-40% (iii) 40-60% (iv) 60-80% (v) 80-100%
c) 2200
(i) 0-20% (ii) 20-40% (iii) 40-60% (iv) 60-80% (v) 80-100%
I feel like question 1 could be tweaked so that it's harder to put in wrong answers (in this case, not weakly increasing probability estimates). Maybe you could ask for the probabilities that humanity will go extinct in certain ranges of time (e.g. "How likely do you think it is that humanity survives to the year 2100 but goes extinct by 2200?"). Or, to circumvent the condition that the probabilities add to less than 100%, you could condition: "Assuming that humanity survives to the year 2100, how likely do you think it is that humanity then goes extinct by 2200?"
I only make these suggestions because I can imagine someone reading the original questions and thinking "Hmm, yes, it seems pretty likely that we annihilate ourselves by 2100: 40-60%" and then putting down 0-20% for part (e) because it's so much harder to think of ways to go extinct that take thousands of years.
And I would reverse the order of 6 and 7: "What is your level of education? If you are a college student, what is your area of study?" And if you want people's past experience to count too, you could ask instead "If you have or are earning a college degree, what is/was your area of study?"