Nonsense questions

I recently read an article about the willingness of kids to answer nonsensical questions. So, for instance, you can ask a kid, "Which is heavier, red or yellow?" and they will readily supply an answer. They went on for a whole range of yes/no type questions and kids happily supplied an answer. But, if the question was more open-ended, the example was "What do feet eat for breakfast?" kids would say they didn't understand the question or say they didn't know.

What are the implications for survey research? Obvious. Social scientists routinely ask people for their opinions about a whole range of issues. Many of these are quite unfamiliar to the respondents. Many are worded in a way that reduces a complex issue to a simple description (success vs. failure). Yet, respondents generally are willing to give an opinion, provide an answer.

For survey researchers, this can be a problem. We may not really be measuring the idea we want to investigate.

But, I also recently read an article about working with Alzheimer's patients. One of the novel approaches was to introduce topics for which there may be no right or wrong answer, that don't depend on memory or recall. One example was, "What's better, coffee or meat?" The purpose of the questions is not to elicit a particular answer, but to establish a relationship with the other person, to engage them.

Maybe for children the nonsense questions seem like reasonable things to consider--wouldn't we all agree that red is heavier than yellow?