Following are examples of text direction used by various countries in Asia, taken from the East Asia Barometer (EAB) survey in 2006 and the ISSP in 2007. These suggest both that design guidelines need to reflect an understanding of how different Asian countries display text both vertically and horizontally, and that it would be desirable to pretest separately questions that differ across countries.
Figure E1: The 2006 EAB Singapore questionnaire: horizontal response option column headers, read from top to bottom.
Figure E2: 2006 EAB Taiwan questionnaire: vertical response option column headers.
Figure E3: The 2006 EAB Mainland China questionnaire: vertical response option column headers, read from right to left.
Figure E4: The 2007 ISSP Japan questionnaire: vertical response option column headers, read from left to right.