This thesis deals with a methodological phenomenon called order effect. This effect creates a situation where the preceding questions influence answers of the subsequent questions. During cognitive responding process, the preceding questions may evoke specific mental associations and ideas that are more easily accessible afterwards during responding of the following questions. This induced information may be used during answer selection process which may cause bias in answers. The same questions placed in different order can generate different answers. Different question order can have different cognitive burden. The aim of this thesis is cognitive burden assessment of different question orders. Data collection was conducted by cognitive interviews which helped to detect how respondents work with particular questions during questionnaire responding process, and to identify specific types of order effect. There are four types of order effect: carryover effect, backfire effect, assimilation and contrast effect. A specific question preceding a general question evokes information which is more accessible for interpretation of a general question therefore this question order is less burdensome. Also the order from negative to positive question is less burdensome than the opposite order because it evokes...

Large-scale voting usability problems have changed the outcomes of several recent elections. The 2006 election in Sarasota County, Florida was one such incident, where the number of votes lost was nearly 50 times greater than the margin of victory for the US Representative race. Multiple hypotheses were proposed to explain this incident, with prevailing theories focused on malicious software, touchscreen miscalibration or poor ballot design, Study I aimed to empirically determine whether Sarasota voters unintentionally skipped the critical US Representative race due to poor ballot design. The Sarasota ballot was replicated initially, then header highlighting and number of races presented on the first screen were manipulated. While the presentation of multiple races had a significant effect on undervotes in the US Representative race, header highlighting did not. Nearly 20% of all voters (27 of 137) skipped the race their first time on that screen, an even greater undervote rate than that originally seen in Sarasota. In conjunction with other research, Study I results strongly suggests that the 2006 Sarasota election was almost certainly a human factors problem. A cognitive model of human voters was developed based on Study I data. Model predictions were then compared with behavioral data from Study 2, in which participants voted on a replica of the Charlotte County, Florida 2006 ballot.