Questionnaire construction refers to the design of a questionnaire to gather statistically useful information about a given topic. When properly constructed and responsibly administered, questionnaires can provide valuable data about any given subject.
Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey data collection, such as questionnaire construction and methods for improving the number and accuracy of responses to surveys. Survey methodology targets instruments or procedures that ask one or more questions that may or may not be answered.
An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll, is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals. A person who conducts polls is referred to as a pollster.
A questionnaire is a research instrument that consists of a set of questions for the purpose of gathering information from respondents through survey or statistical study. A research questionnaire is typically a mix of close-ended questions and open-ended questions. Open-ended, long-term questions offer the respondent the ability to elaborate on their thoughts. The Research questionnaire was developed by the Statistical Society of London in 1838.
Response bias is a general term for a wide range of tendencies for participants to respond inaccurately or falsely to questions. These biases are prevalent in research involving participant self-report, such as structured interviews or surveys. Response biases can have a large impact on the validity of questionnaires or surveys.
The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) is a professional organization of more than 2,000 public opinion and survey research professionals in the United States and from around the world, with members from academia, media, government, the non-profit sector and private industry. AAPOR publishes three academic journals: Public Opinion Quarterly, Survey Practice and the Journal for Survey Statistics and Methodology. It holds an annual research conference and maintains a "Code of Professional Ethics and Practices", for survey research which all members agree to follow. The association's founders include pioneering pollsters Archibald Crossley, George Gallup, and Elmo Roper.
In survey research, response rate, also known as completion rate or return rate, is the number of people who answered the survey divided by the number of people in the sample. It is usually expressed in the form of a percentage. The term is also used in direct marketing to refer to the number of people who responded to an offer.
The World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) is an international professional association of researchers in the field of survey research. It is a member organization of the International Science Council.
The Metallic Metals Act was a fictional piece of legislation included in a 1947 American opinion survey conducted by Sam Gill and published in the March 14, 1947, issue of Tide magazine. When given four possible replies, 70% of respondents claimed to have an opinion on the act. It has become a classic example of the risks of meaningless responses to closed-ended questions and prompted the study of the pseudo-opinion phenomenon.
Acquiescence bias, also known as agreement bias, is a category of response bias common to survey research in which respondents have a tendency to select a positive response option or indicate a positive connotation disproportionately more frequently. Respondents do so without considering the content of the question or their 'true' preference. Acquiescence is sometimes referred to as "yea-saying" and is the tendency of a respondent to agree with a statement when in doubt. Questions affected by acquiescence bias take the following format: a stimulus in the form of a statement is presented, followed by 'agree/disagree,' 'yes/no' or 'true/false' response options. For example, a respondent might be presented with the statement "gardening makes me feel happy," and would then be expected to select either 'agree' or 'disagree.' Such question formats are favoured by both survey designers and respondents because they are straightforward to produce and respond to. The bias is particularly prevalent in the case of surveys or questionnaires that employ truisms as the stimuli, such as: "It is better to give than to receive" or "Never a lender nor a borrower be". Acquiescence bias can introduce systematic errors that affect the validity of research by confounding attitudes and behaviours with the general tendency to agree, which can result in misguided inference. Research suggests that the proportion of respondents who carry out this behaviour is between 10% and 20%.
Computer-assisted web interviewing (CAWI) is an Internet surveying technique in which the interviewee follows a script provided in a website. The questionnaires are made in a program for creating web interviews. The program allows for the questionnaire to contain pictures, audio and video clips, links to different web pages, etc. The website is able to customize the flow of the questionnaire based on the answers provided, as well as information already known about the participant. It is considered to be a cheaper way of surveying since one doesn't need to use people to hold surveys unlike computer-assisted telephone interviewing. With the increasing use of the Internet, online questionnaires have become a popular way of collecting information. The design of an online questionnaire has a dramatic effect on the quality of data gathered. There are many factors in designing an online questionnaire; guidelines, available question formats, administration, quality and ethic issues should be reviewed. Online questionnaires should be seen as a sub-set of a wider-range of online research methods.
Andrew Kohut was an American pollster and nonpartisan news commentator about public affairs topics.
James A. Davis (1929–2016) was a distinguished American sociologist who is best known as a pioneer in the application of quantitative statistical methods to social science research and teaching. Most recently, he was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Chicago.
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University is the world's oldest archive of social science data and the largest specializing in data from public opinion surveys. Its collection includes over 27,000 datasets and more than 855,000 questions with responses in Roper iPoll, adding hundreds more each year. The archive contains responses from millions of individuals on a vast range of topics. The current executive director of the center is Jonathon P. Schuldt, Associate Professor of Communication at Cornell University, with a governing board of directors chaired by Robert Y. Shapiro of Columbia University.
Lawrence D. Bobo is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences and the Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection of social psychology, social inequality, politics, and race.
Jon Alexander Krosnick is a professor of Political Science, Communication, and Psychology, and director of the Political Psychology Research Group (PPRG) at Stanford University. Additionally, he is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences and an affiliate of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Krosnick has served as a consultant for government agencies, universities, and businesses, has testified as an expert in court proceedings, and has been an on-air television commentator on election night.
Willem Egbert (Wim) Saris is a Dutch sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Statistics and Methodology, especially known for his work on "Causal modelling in non-experimental research" and measurement errors.
Nancy A. Bates is a statistician who works as a senior researcher at the United States Census Bureau. Bates earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Oklahoma in 1985 and 1987, and began working for the census bureau in 1988.
Nancy A. Mathiowetz is an American sociologist and statistician, known for her pioneering combination of cognitive psychology with survey methodology and for her research on poverty and disability.
Elizabeth A. (Betsy) Martin is a former American statistician and environmental activist, known for bringing principles from cognitive science into survey design, and for improving the ability of the United States census to count homeless people. She is a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
