Stanley Presser – författare

Over the past two decades, methods for the development, evaluation, and testing of survey questionnaires have undergone radical change. Research has now begun to identify the strengths and weaknesses of various testing and evaluation methods, as well as to estimate the methods’ reliability and validity. Expanding and adding to the research presented at the International Conference on Questionnaire Development, Evaluation and Testing Methods, this title presents the most up-to-date knowledge in this burgeoning field.

The only book dedicated to the evaluation and testing of survey questionnaires, this practical reference work brings together the expertise of over fifty leading, international researchers from a broad range of fields. The volume is divided into seven sections:

Comprehensive and carefully edited, this groundbreaking text offers researchers a solid foundation in the latest developments in testing and evaluating survey questionnaires, as well as a thorough introduction to emerging techniques and technologies.

Awarded the 2005 Philip Converse Award by the American Political Science AssociationRecipient of the 1996 Paul Lazarsfeld award by the American Sociological Association Methodology Section

"Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys makes an enormous contribution to the field of survey methodology and ranks with such classics as Hyman's Interviewing and Kish's Survey Sampling. To the extent that survey research is only as reliable as its methodology, this book becomes a long-missing foundation stone for the social sciences in general."

--Tom Smith in American Journal of Sociology

"This volume reports on the sort of program of research we all constantly advocate. . . . It is large-scale, systematic, and cumulative. . . . The book is chock-full of . . . careful generalizations, leaving a reader informed and dazzled."

--Judith Tanur in Public Opinion

"The book is virtually a treasure chest for the survey methodologist and the survey practitioner." --Lars Bergman in Journal of Official Statistics "This is a classic. . . . Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser have produced a work whose insights and vision have an enduring quality. . . . No one undertaking public opinion analysis in years to come can be taken seriously without becoming intimately familiar with this pioneering research."

--John Robinson in Social Forces

"In a fundamental way, Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser have pioneered a new state of the art for conducting research on the form, wording, and context of questions asked in attitude surveys."

--Robert A. Ellis in Contemporary Psychology

"The prodigious work of Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser . . . demonstrates that question wording cannot be isolated from theory or the context of specific issues."

--Angell Beza in Contemporary Sociology

Comprehensive in its coverage, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys covers such issues as question order and response order effects; the lack of overlap between respondent-generated categories for open-ended questions and the closed categories generated by research, even with extensive pretesting with open questions; the effects of explicitly offering respondents a "don't know" or a middle opinion alternative; attitude strength and its relation to reliability; and issues of wording tone.

"An extremely useful handbook for students and any newcomers to survey research."

--Network

Recent research has yielded many new clues about how survey questions "behave," and some of these findings have offered practical guidance for question writing. Volume 63 reviews this experimental literature and provides both general guiding principles and specific advice on how to develop a survey questionnaire, emphasizing the practical implications of the experience and research of questionnaire designers. The authors also suggest a number of ways in which to make pilot and pretest work more fruitful. The material is easily accessible, yet professionally sophisticated.

This volume should be useful to social scientists and others who design survey questionnaires.