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Procedures and Measures for Further Research 55
certain issue or satisfaction with a service, should be asked as early as possible to make respondents
feel as though their input and participation is valued. It is also considered good practice to ensure
that questions follow a logical and appealing sequence that helps respondents understand what is
being sought from them. For example, in asking about travel or activity details, one should begin
with the starting time of the travel or activity, the location of the activity or the means of travel used
first, and so proceed through a logical sequence of details. Sequencing is also important for ques-
tions on occupation and working at home. There are many occupations (retail clerk, air-traffic con-
troller, sanitation worker, etc.) that do not permit working at home. Therefore, care needs to be
taken not to ask a question about working at home following a question on occupation. These
ordering procedures are valid for all types of surveys because, even in self-administered surveys,
respondents generally work through the survey from the beginning and answer as they go as they
would using a different methodology.
Although these issues are generally well understood in the transportation planning community,
very little research has ever been done to investigate the extent to which ordering of questions
appears to be correlated with non-response. It was intended that such research would be conducted
in this project using a collection of survey instruments dating back to the 1960s. However, the scale
of this task became very large, and there was insufficient time to conduct a thorough investigation
of the area. It is recommended that future research be focused on meeting two main objectives.
First, to determine what aspects of question ordering are important to the creation of respondent-
friendly surveys and what question ordering seems to be most beneficial to response. Second, where
applicable, a practical list of "do's and don'ts" should be developed on the ordering of questions
which can be observed by practitioners during the survey design process. Standardized procedures
should suggest an order for certain blocks of questions within a survey (e.g., those relating to
recruitment, travel/activity recall) and should provide guidance on what questions should be con-
sidered as part of each group--for example, the household information, vehicle information, per-
son information, and travel/activity information. It is also recommended that work be done to
develop some alternative orderings of sensitive questions and to include these within some com-
parative pilot tests. Future research should also consider the possibility that some questions should
be asked more than once and in different ways, such as asking income in both recruitment and
retrieval calls in a CATI survey, and asking one time with categories and one time with a more
than/less than question format.
4.2.8 I-6: Instrument Design
Developing consistency in instrument design is not a trivial task, and it was known from the out-
set of this project that there would probably not be enough time for sufficient research on this item.
The potential for variations in instrument design is unlimited. There are many different formats
that can be adopted (booklet, leaflet, two-sided card, etc.) and the length of the instruments them-
selves can vary, depending on the level of information sought. Tests to date of different formats in
this respect have been inconclusive, and it seems likely that rather extensive further tests will be
needed to provide any type of conclusive results on this issue.
In addition to considerations about the physical form of the instruments themselves, there is
also the issue of what fonts should and should not be used. Hundreds, if not thousands, of differ-
ent fonts are available in modern word processing programs, and there is limitless potential for
other formatting features to be used for directing respondents--bold, underline, italics, use of
color, arrows, boxes, and other devices. One of the main difficulties in defining consistent designs
relates to the fact that design is a relatively subjective process and relies heavily on personal prefer-
ences. A design considered by one person as bad may be considered good by another. While it may
be important to develop consistency in this area, recommendations should not be prescriptive
about the way instruments should be designed because instrument design is an area that should
