Questionnaires

Questionnaires are one of the principal research tools for discovering people's thoughts, experience, attitudes and orientations to future action. Social scientists and researchers have been using questionnaires systematically for about three quarters of a century, since market research, opinion polling and survey research became a feature in both US and UK society in the 1920s and 30s.This unrivalled collection provides the most complete resource of material about questionnaires.The first volume provides an introduction to the use of questionnaires. It examines the principles of question construction, considers different types of questionnaire, principles of social measurement and the relationship between expressed attitudes, and actual social behaviour. The second volume covers the main types of questionnaire and question construction. Included here is material on question order, question wording and response alternatives. The measurement of attitudes is examined.The third volume focuses on how to handle sensitive questons, problems of validity, the extent to which researchers succeed in measuring what they want to measure, and the relationship between the tools which they use and the underlying theoretical constructs. The fourth volume, on Surveys in the World, brings together the best material on memory and recall, truth-telling issues and how respondents comprehend basic questions. The advent of the computer programmed questionnaire is examined.The collection represents a distillation of the world's best material on questions and questionnaires in social surveys.Martin Bulmer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey and co-director of its Institute of Social Research.