A Practical Guide to Survey Questionnaire Design and Evaluation

A Practical Guide to Survey Questionnaire Design and Evaluation summarizes principles, guidelines, and best practices for developing and testing survey questionnaires driven and supported by theoretical and empirical research. It provides a broad overview of literature on questionnaire design, drawing on both theoretical and empirical research.

This book consists of three parts. The first covers the survey response process model, which will serve as the theoretical framework to establish the basic principles of writing different types of survey questions (attitudinal, behavioral, demographic, and knowledge). The second part of this book focuses on special topics such as sensitive questions, developing questionnaires for older adults and children, designing a paper survey, designing a web survey and optimizing for a mobile device, developing questionnaires for a multimode survey, and conducting surveys in multiple languages and cultures. The third part of this book describes methods for testing and evaluating survey questions. Topics cover focus groups, cognitive interviewing, expert review, Questionnaire Appraisal System, behavior coding, respondent and interviewer debriefing, randomized experiments, and pilot studies. Given extensive web survey coverage, we also discuss usability testing of web surveys. Finally, we present a brief overview of the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for questionnaire development and evaluation. Suggestions for further reading, case studies, and discussion questions are included in all chapters.

This book will be of interest to those using survey methodology/questionnaires and graduate courses incorporating survey design across the social and behavioral sciences, including psychology, communication studies, nursing and healthcare research, sociology, anthropology, and education.

Emilia Peytcheva is a senior survey methodologist at RTI International and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in survey methodology from the University of Michigan and has 25 years of experience designing and implementing surveys in different modes.

Ting Yan is a Vice President at NORC at the University of Chicago, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Survey Methodology from University of Maryland and has more than 25 years of experience in questionnaire design and evaluation. She has published extensively on survey methodology.