How to Conduct Self-Administered and Mail Surveys (Survey Kit, Vol 3)

"The chief strength of this volume is the comprehensive coverage. I can′t cover all of these issues with questionnaires in my survey class and would welcome a text that can walk students more comprehensively through the process. The coverage is accurate and the authors do a good job of pointing out the various disagreements among survey researchers about proper survey protocol. At the same time, I appreciate it that there is some closure on some of these debates with respect to recommendations made by the authors." --Kevin Thompson, Department of Sociology, North Dakota State University Looking for a single resource that can provide the basic tools for conducting self-administered and mail surveys? How to Conduct Self-Administered and Mail Surveys is the answer with its thorough descriptions of the various types of self-administered questionnaires and its careful explanations of the circumstances under which each type of questionnaire can be most appropriately used. The authors show you how to develop questions and format a user-friendly questionnaire; to pretest, pilot test, and revise questionnaires; and to write advance and cover letters that motivate and increase response rates. They describe follow-up procedures for nonrespondents from tracking to amount and timing of follow-ups and show you how to estimate personnel requirements and the costs of a self-administered or mailed survey. The authors also demonstrate how to process, edit, and code questionnaires as well as keep records and fully document the development and administration of the questionnaire and the data collected with it.

Linda Bourque, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences and an associate director of both the Center for Public Health and Disasters and the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center in the UCLA School of Public Health. Trained as a sociologist, she teaches courses on research design with an emphasis on the design, data processing, and data analysis of questionnaires and community-based surveys. Her research during the last twenty years has focused on community response to disasters. A public website contains all of the raw data, codebooks, questionnaires, publications and related material from surveys conducted on California earthquakes since 1971 by Leo Reeder, Ralph Turner, Dennis Mileti and Linda Bourque. Current research includes the National Survey of Disaster Experiences and Preparedness (NSDEP), and the California Survey of Earthquake Preparedness.

Funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation, NSDEP examines the factors that predict disaster preparedness and risk avoidant behavior, with an emphasis on terrorism. A stratified sample of 3,300 households was selected using random digit dialing: 1,000 households were selected for interview in areas considered at high risk of terrorism (Washington, D.C., New York City, Los Angeles County), and 2,300 households were selected for interview throughout the rest of the continental United States. Respondents were asked whether they had invested in six preparedness behaviors and seven risk avoidant behaviors either because of terrorism, natural disasters, other reasons, or any combination of the three. NSDEP reports and other documentation are available here.

Eve Picardy Fielder died on Oct. 27 at home in Venice, CA, after a long illness. She was 67. An academic researcher, she received her doctorate in public health from UCLA, where she was the director of the Survey Research Center. Many of the hundreds of survey research projects she managed focused on public policies related to social issues and service delivery in the areas of health and welfare. She also conducted research of her own on issues of relevance to the Hispanic/Latino communities