and also can seem inappropriate and threatening if asked before a level of trust is established in the interview. The interviewer wants to engage the respondent from the beginning of the conversation so that the respondent is interested in the survey and will continue to answer questions. If the interviewer started the survey by asking the respondent's age or sex, the respondent might get bored and decide not to continue with the survey. In addition, if someone called you and first started asking how much money you make, your race, how many children you have, etc., you might be put off by these personal questions and decide not to continue with the survey. You can view the most commonly asked demographic questions in Pew Research Center for the People & the Press surveys, in the order we ask them, here . What's all this rotating and randomizing going on in your questionnaires? Rotating or randomizing means that questions or items in a list are not asked in the same order to each respondent. We know that answers to questions are sometimes affected by questions that precede them. By presenting questions in a different order to each respondent, we ensure that each question gets asked in the same context as every other question the same number of times (e.g., first, last or any position in between). This does not eliminate the potential impact of previous questions on the current question, but it does ensure that this bias is spread randomly across