Designing Surveys : A Guide to Decisions and Procedures

The Second Edition of Designing Surveys: A Guide to Decisions and Procedures accounts for changes in telephone, Internet, and email surveying and provides a more comprehensive treatment on questionnaire testing. Despite changing technologies, however, the principles of scientific survey design remain unchanged, including the selection of the sample, the writing of questions to solicit an unbiased response, and the ethical treatment of human subjects. This new edition addresses these issues in the context of new and emerging technologies and their relationship to survey design and the social sciences. Designing Surveys provides an accurate account of how modern survey research is actually conducted, but with the needs and goals of a novice researcher in mind.

Johnny Blair is Senior Survey Methodologist at Abt-SRBI. Previously, he was a Principal Scientist at Abt Associates and a manager of survey operations at the University of Maryland Survey Research Center and the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Survey Research Laboratory. Over a forty-year career in survey research, he has designed and/or implemented surveys for health (including HIV high risk populations), education (including large-scale student assessments), environment (including contingent valuation), and criminal victimization (including proxy reporting) surveys among other areas.

He has conducted methodological research on sampling rare populations, measurement error in proxy reporting, cognitive and usability testing of computer-based student writing assessments and data quality in converted refusal interviews. He has been involved in a decade-long program of research on cognitive interview pretesting, most recently on the theory of pretest sample size and the validation of pretest problem identification.

He has been a member of the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly, and has served on several National Research Council Panels and been a consultant to many federal agencies, academic organizations, law firms and other companies. Since 1996, he has served on the Design and Analysis Committee (DAC) for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card.