Why Survey Questions are Convoluted

There are at least three factors at work that make survey questions particularly convoluted.

First, questions need to be precise in meaning. There is, however, a constant tension between using more precise, technical terms that may be unfamiliar or everyday terms that may have imprecise meanings. Precision, particularly with imprecise everyday terms, often ends up requiring a welter of qualifying clauses that stretch grammar to its breaking point (except perhaps in German, which handles this well), and overrun the brain's ability to hold all the various conditions in mind at once (except, perhaps, for Germans). Negation is employed freely, both because it is sometimes necessary but also to break up what would be unidirectional banks of items. On the other hand, Converse and Presser's near-canonical text tells us to avoid double negatives, which may require its own linguistic acrobatics.

Second, there is extensive switching in subject and object because the first party (the interviewer) must ask the second party (the respondent) questions that refer to the second party sometimes in the first person ("Would you agree or disagree with the following statement: I see myself as more intelligent than average") and sometimes in the second person ("Do you think that people of the same sex should be allowed to marry?"), and of course about third parties, some of whom will be specified by their relationship to the second party (e.g., the relatives we had trouble with in the hand shaking question). Related to this is the tendency of surveys to ask about institutions (e.g., government) and constructs (e.g., shariah) that may raise questions of when to treat as a person vs. an object or treat as singular or plural; this is exacerbated in some instances because treating something as plural or singular, person or thing, may be ideologically charged.

Third, tense varies extensively, with surveys not uncommonly asking about past, present, and future, as well as freely employing conditional tenses ("If X happened, would you do Y or Z?") in close proximity to one another.

And then there is the synergistic effect of these different types of deviations from normal, everyday language happening together. As I think about it, really only legislation and technical manuals approach surveys in the need for precision in language and they, at least, are generally spared the complexities of first, second, and third person that accompany a survey.