Blair, Czala and Blair (2014)
Johnny Blair, Ronald F. Czaja, Edward A. Blair
Designing Surveys: A Guide to Decisions and Procedures
(Sage 2014)
[reviewed 6 March 2015]
I have no hesitation in recommending this book. Whereas some books tend to be more academic (and sometimes based on limited, if any, serious experience of actually doing surveys) this book is written by people who do surveys for a living, one of them for forty years. It’s far superior to anything else on the market and sits nicely between Andres (2012) and Marsden and Wright (2010) and can be seen as the practitioner equivalent of the more formally academic De Vaus (2014)
With its combination of accumulated wisdom and narrative skill, it’s easy (and fulfilling) to read, and you can barely see the joins. It has been written by very experienced fellow professionals used to dealing with operational practicalities, spiced with (just enough, but not too much) theory and thankfully few equations (formulae are immediately off-putting for students in sociology and similar areas).
The first three chapters should be on every undergraduate social research methods reading list (and won’t scare them off) and the whole book a preferred course text for all post-graduate and early (in-house) career training programs in survey research.
One or two key references are missing from the bibliography and there are no mentions of major British or European surveys which have already addressed some of the methodological issues raised in the book, but these omissions in no way detract from its value.
The book is peppered with URLs, but there is no companion website so you'll have to type them all in yourself. The frequent checklists and detailed advice in the book, plus the dozens of real examples and summary case studies, convinced me that survey research is a discipline in its own right, that the best survey researchers do it well intuitively (not from text-books) and that questionnaire design is an art rather than a science. There's nothing on data analysis as such, but there is no shortage of textbooks and on-line resources for that, including those on this site..
If you are serious about learning or doing survey research, buy your own copy now.
Designing Surveys: A Guide to Decisions and Procedures
(Sage 2014)
[reviewed 6 March 2015]
I have no hesitation in recommending this book. Whereas some books tend to be more academic (and sometimes based on limited, if any, serious experience of actually doing surveys) this book is written by people who do surveys for a living, one of them for forty years. It’s far superior to anything else on the market and sits nicely between Andres (2012) and Marsden and Wright (2010) and can be seen as the practitioner equivalent of the more formally academic De Vaus (2014)
With its combination of accumulated wisdom and narrative skill, it’s easy (and fulfilling) to read, and you can barely see the joins. It has been written by very experienced fellow professionals used to dealing with operational practicalities, spiced with (just enough, but not too much) theory and thankfully few equations (formulae are immediately off-putting for students in sociology and similar areas).
The first three chapters should be on every undergraduate social research methods reading list (and won’t scare them off) and the whole book a preferred course text for all post-graduate and early (in-house) career training programs in survey research.
One or two key references are missing from the bibliography and there are no mentions of major British or European surveys which have already addressed some of the methodological issues raised in the book, but these omissions in no way detract from its value.
The book is peppered with URLs, but there is no companion website so you'll have to type them all in yourself. The frequent checklists and detailed advice in the book, plus the dozens of real examples and summary case studies, convinced me that survey research is a discipline in its own right, that the best survey researchers do it well intuitively (not from text-books) and that questionnaire design is an art rather than a science. There's nothing on data analysis as such, but there is no shortage of textbooks and on-line resources for that, including those on this site..
If you are serious about learning or doing survey research, buy your own copy now.