Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Context

Awarded the 2005 Philip Converse Award by the American Political Science Association

Recipient of the 1996 Paul Lazarsfeld award by the American Sociological Association Methodology Section

"Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys makes an enormous contribution to the field of survey methodology and ranks with such classics as Hyman′s Interviewing and Kish′s Survey Sampling. To the extent that survey research is only as reliable as its methodology, this book becomes a long-missing foundation stone for the social sciences in general."

--Tom Smith in American Journal of Sociology

"This volume reports on the sort of program of research we all constantly advocate. . . . It is large-scale, systematic, and cumulative. . . . The book is chock-full of . . . careful generalizations, leaving a reader informed and dazzled."

--Judith Tanur in Public Opinion

"The book is virtually a treasure chest for the survey methodologist and the survey practitioner." --Lars Bergman in Journal of Official Statistics "This is a classic. . . . Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser have produced a work whose insights and vision have an enduring quality. . . . No one undertaking public opinion analysis in years to come can be taken seriously without becoming intimately familiar with this pioneering research."

--John Robinson in Social Forces

"In a fundamental way, Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser have pioneered a new state of the art for conducting research on the form, wording, and context of questions asked in attitude surveys."

--Robert A. Ellis in Contemporary Psychology

"The prodigious work of Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser . . . demonstrates that question wording cannot be isolated from theory or the context of specific issues."

--Angell Beza in Contemporary Sociology

Comprehensive in its coverage, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys covers such issues as question order and response order effects; the lack of overlap between respondent-generated categories for open-ended questions and the closed categories generated by research, even with extensive pretesting with open questions; the effects of explicitly offering respondents a "don′t know" or a middle opinion alternative; attitude strength and its relation to reliability; and issues of wording tone.

Stanley Presser is interested in the interface between social psychology and survey measurement. His research focuses on questionnaire design and testing, the accuracy of survey responses, nonresponse, and ethical issues stemming from the use of human subjects. His books include Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys (with Howard Schuman), Survey Questions (with Jean Converse), and Survey Research Methods (with Eleanor Singer). In addition to being professor of sociology, he teaches in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, which he founded in 1992 with colleagues at the University of Michigan and Westat, Inc. He has served as editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, was president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association. Presser was director of the Maryland Survey Research Center from 1989 to 2000.