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thomblake comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yes. That question is asking two different things, which a survey question should never do (in the extreme, that's called a "loaded question").
Well, if one interprets “asking two different things” broadly, any question with more than two answers is doing that, e.g. the one about sexual orientation is asking whether you're sexually attracted to males and whether you're sexually attracted to females. (Maybe I'd split that one, too, as Facebook does.)
It depends on whether you end up covering all of the possibilities. It's fine to ask something like this (though it's phrased badly and confusing):
But this would not be good:
The point is to not have any respondents who could not truthfully select one of the options in a single-punch list, or at least one option in a multi-punch list. The above question offers no response for folks who haven't seen Iron Man but don't hate comic book movies, or folks who have seen Iron Man but didn't like it.
Well, technically the question about children in the draft doesn't do that (except for ambiguities such as how to count dead children, or people who are exactly indifferent about having children in the future), but I still think it divides personspace in a weird way.
Yes, technically there's no excluded middle problem there. Instead, it's gathering information about future child-wanting only for those with no children, which is a different problem.