Response order effects are common in surveys and, in web surveys, they generally take the form of primacy effects (that is, options are more popular when they come first or near the beginning of the list of options than when they come last or near the end).

Evidence from eye-tracking studies suggests that respondents give increasingly less attention to the options that come later in the list, sometimes failing to read the final options at all. We attempted to counteract this tendency for respondents to ignore or gloss over the options at the end of the list by making those options distinctive in various ways. We report the results of a web experiment that looked at several methods for attracting the respondent’s attention to the final option. We examine the effects of these methods for both select-one items and check-all-thatapply items.