Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

146 ASKING QUESTIONS
questions. So, too, the order of questions provides a context within
which questions are answered. Questions that are quite closely
related tend to increase the saliency of particular aspects of the
object. For example, in an early study by the American Marketing
Association (1937), the placement of questions seemed to influence
women’s attitudes toward advertising. When questions about advertising
followed questions about dress advertising, women’s attitudes
toward advertising were more positive than when general advertising
questions preceded the dress questions. The explanation for this
finding was that women tended to think about all types of advertising
when the questions were not preceded by a more narrowly
defining set of questions about dress advertising. Since women’s
attitudes toward dress advertising were more favorable than toward
other types of advertising, they responded more favorably to advertising
questions when earlier questions directed their attention
toward dress advertising.
General and Specific Questions
Frequently we are interested in asking about attitudes toward some
general object and then following up with questions about more
specific aspects of that object. For instance, we might be interested
in respondents’ attitude toward abortion in general, and also about
abortion in particular circumstances.
When a general question and a more specific-related question
are asked together, the general question is affected by its position,
whereas the more specific question is not. An example is two questions
of this sort that appeared in the 1975 General Social Survey:
“Taking things all together, how would you describe your marriage?
Would you say that your marriage is very happy, pretty happy,
or not too happy?”
“Taken all together, how would you say things are these days?
Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too
happy?”