Survey Questions: Handcrafting the Standardized Questionnaire

"An extremely useful handbook for students and any newcomers to survey research."

--Network

Recent research has yielded many new clues about how survey questions "behave," and some of these findings have offered practical guidance for question writing. Volume 63 reviews this experimental literature and provides both general guiding principles and specific advice on how to develop a survey questionnaire, emphasizing the practical implications of the experience and research of questionnaire designers. The authors also suggest a number of ways in which to make pilot and pretest work more fruitful. The material is easily accessible, yet professionally sophisticated.

This volume should be useful to social scientists and others who design survey questionnaires.

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.