Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

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PREFACE
of specialized programs used to support survey data collection—for
example, CAPI (computer-assisted personal interviewing) or CATI
(computer-assisted telephone interviewing), to name the most
common forms of CASIC. The greater use of computer technology
at every stage of data collection in surveys has made many of the
suggestions in our earlier edition obsolete and necessitated a thorough
reworking of discussion that was predicated on traditional
paper-and-pencil questionnaires. We are also beginning an era of
Web-based surveys. Although there is still much to learn about this
new method of conducting surveys, we have tried to incorporate
what we know at this time into our discussions where relevant.
We have tried to make the book self-contained by including
major references. Some readers, however, may wish to refer to our
earlier books, Response Effects in Surveys: A Review and Synthesis
(Sudman and Bradburn, 1974); Improving Interview Method and
Questionnaire Design: Response Effects to Threatening Questions in
Survey Research (Bradburn, Sudman, and Associates, 1979); Thinking
About Answers (Sudman, Bradburn, and Schwarz, 1996); and
Consumer Panels, (Sudman and Wansink, 2002), for more detailed
discussion of the empirical data that support our recommendations.
This book is specifically concerned with questionnaire construction—not
with all aspects of survey design and administration.
Although we stress the careful formulation of the research problems
before a questionnaire is designed, we do not tell you how to select
and formulate important research problems. To do so requires a
solid knowledge of your field—knowledge obtained through study
and review of earlier research, as well as hard thinking and creativity.
Once the research problem is formulated, however, this book
can help you ask the right questions.
The book is divided into three parts. In Part I we discuss the
social context of question asking. We present our central thesis,
namely that questions must be precisely worded if responses to a
survey are to be accurate; we outline a conceptual framework for
understanding the survey interview and present examples to illus-