Effects of the Position of Demographic Questions on Survey Responses

In many surveys, one of the most important goals is to obtain reliable and valid responses from respondents. To achieve the goal, a researcher have to make efforts to protect respondents' confidentiality and to reduce the effects of social desirability on answers. The key question of this paper is whether the position of demographic questions have an effect on responses. Two types of questionnaires are considered: one puts the demographic questions at the beginning and the other does at the last. On both types, I asked only a small number of demographic questions which are considered as essential on analytic purposes. The results show no evidence of position effects when the risk to threat confidentiality was minimized.