Question order --- the art of questioning

One of the important hypothesis in my thesis is that in order to answer multiple questions, most people construct the answers in the order of questions. This should be a no-doubt fact just like most people write with their right hand. But to be a "serious researcher" and to write a "scientific thesis" , I need to find the supporting theory behind it.

So I did a google search on "question order" and did find out that this is actually quite a big topic in survey resarch in psychology. Although it has very little relation to my real thesis question, but it is fun to know :D

An interesting example of question-order effect is that:

"we did a study where we asked students, 'How satisfied are you with your life? How often do you have a date?' The two answers were not statistically related-you would conclude that there is no relationship between dating frequency and life satisfaction. But when we reversed the order and asked, 'How often do you have a date? How satisfied are you with your life?' the statistical relationship was a strong one. You would now conclude that there is nothing as important in a student's life as dating frequency."

And they also find out that question-order effects disappears as people age, because as we age, our memory gets worse, and as memory gets worse, we figured that questions asked earlier in the survey wouldn't have as much influence.

Hah, seems next time, when we ask the grandpa something , we'd better ask directly, all those background information we ask first might not help that much as he might forget already when he come to the final question :P Vice versa to my nephew.

Hah, this is "the art of questioning" :P