Customer Reviews

The Psychology of Survey Response

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Tourangeau, Rips and Rasinki collaborated over four years to put this terrific volume together - and the hard work shows in its 342 pages of clearly written text and and close to 40 pages of references. Full marks all round!

The book covers psychological topics (such as how respondents recall facts - or don't, and how people make estimates,) as well as such technical topics that guide us in questionnaire design.

The three authors cover a huge range of human biases in the way respondents perceive and contextualise the questions we endeavour to write. At every step they provide us with clear and sometimes dramatic examples, for example where responses shift by more than 30 per cent simply through question order.

This is one of the few market research/survey design texts where the writing is cogent and clear: written in a style that I'd describe as colleague to colleague. Bravo! What a difference this makes.

I consequently rate this book right up there with the excellent Scott Plous book, Psychology of Judgment & Decision Making as one of the two most essential backgrounders for survey designers and questionnaire writers. We ignore respondent biases at our peril: this volume specifically shows us how to write more reliable, less ambiguous questions - and how to interpret the sometimes unexpected results we receive for our efforts.

This book distills years of research into a theory of how people answer survey questions. Authored by three respected survey researchers, it is written for "...(1) social psychologists, political scientists, and others who study public opinion or who use data from public opinion surveys; (2) cognitive psychologists and other researchers who are interested in everyday memory and judgment processes; and (3) survey researchers, methodologists, and statisticians who are involved in designing and carrying out surveys."

The authors begin by reviewing previous theories of survey response and then introduce their own model. This model is organized around four mental processes that survey participants must perform: Comprehend the question, retrieve information from memory, make a judgment based on that information, and translate that judgment into a response. Much of the book is organized around this model.

Subsequent chapters address how participants understand--and misunderstand--survey questions, remember relevant information, and make judgments about it. We explore the effects of different question formats, alternative wording and variations in question order. Then the authors explore how survey participants decide to answer, including how they filter and edit their responses before committing to them. The book closes with a discussion of the implications of this model for future survey practice and research to improve that practice.

This book is indeed useful for practitioners and researchers. It is worth digesting in its entirety, but its organization supports selective grazing by practitioners who want to focus on improving a single aspect of their surveys. Since it is over ten years old, the book has drifted behind current thinking in some respects. Readers would be wise to supplement with articles from Public Opinion Quarterly and more recent methods books, such as Groves, Fowler, Couper and Lepkowski's Survey Methodology or Fowler's Survey Research Methods.

I've enjoyed this edition a lot. The authors incorporate the essential psychological elements with survey methodology nicely.
I'd highly recommend this book to people in the survey research field.

This book is very well written and researched and is a must for everyone who wants to learn more about serious social science research.