Customer Reviews

Asking Questions: A Practical Guide to Questionnaire Design (Social & Behavioral Science Series)

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People tend to see asking questions as an intuitive, conversational means of communication. Wrong. As someone in the professional survey field (SuperSurvey.com), I see a lot of questions every day -- good and bad. Some questions are so poorly written that the responses actually reduce the quality of the survey results.

Sudman & Bradburn's book, although originally written for the pre-Internet age, helps people to learn the art and science of writing good questions. The most helpful part of the book is the collection of actual, concrete suggestions for how to word certain types (e.g. threatening/nonthreatening) of questions, mixed with examples of the themes in practice. In addition to designing and wording the actual questions, intelligent strategies for survey instrument design are included. These strategies are mostly pre-Internet, but can be adapted to the constraints and freedoms of Internet surveying.

(Surprisingly, though, even today polls and surveys constantly violate the principles in this book. Perhaps a good read alongside _Asking Questions_ would be _How to Lie With Statistics_).

_Asking Questions_ lets your surveys and questionnaires benefit from decades of social science and opinion research. Reading it once back in college probably isn't good enough: everyone who does surveys professionally should keep a copy at his desk.

I was looking for a book on improving survey questions that provided information on reducing bias in survey wording and structure. This book was a great help to me and exceeded my expectations. The book addresses pre-survey issues, specific question-type issues, and survey structure (ordering of questions) issues in a very organized format with plenty of clear examples. The only down-side to the book is that it was written back in '82. I'm wondering if there is a more current version of an equivalent book. I wasn't able to find one.

This book has been an indispendible reference for professional survey researchers since it was written. Asking Questions provides questionnaire writers with extremely useful design guidance and checklists. Most importantly, the book is very easy to read and use. Sudman and Bradburn's status as leading survey methodologists adds to the book's credability.

The book is somewhat dated. It's authors were pioneers in the movement to examine the cognitive processes that respondents use to answer questions. Much has been learned since. Unfortunately, due to the recent death of Seymour Sudman, an update of this book is unlikely.

The longevity of this book is remarkable and extremely well earned. The guidance it provides is as useful today as it was in 1982.