The Psychology of Survey Response

By Roger Tourangeau, Kenneth Rasinski, Lance J. Rips

Book Overview

Drawing on classic and modern research from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and survey methodology, this book examines the psychological roots of survey data, how survey responses are formulated, and how seemingly unimportant features of the survey can affect the answers obtained. Topics include the comprehension of survey questions, the recall of relevant facts and beliefs, estimation and inferential processes people use to answer survey questions, the sources of the apparent instability of public opinion, the difficulties in getting responses into the required format, and distortions introduced into surveys by deliberate misreporting.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521576296
• ISBN13: 9780521576291
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Clear writing, logical structure - everything you need to know about respondent biases and how quest

Tourangeau, Rips and Rasinki collaborated over four years to put this terrific volume together - and the hard work shows in its 342 pages of clearly written text and and close to 40 pages of references. Full marks all round! The book covers psychological topics (such as how respondents recall facts - or don't, and how people make estimates,) as well as such technical topics that guide us in questionnaire design. The three authors cover a huge range of human biases in the way respondents perceive and contextualise the questions we endeavour to write. At every step they provide us with clear and sometimes dramatic examples, for example where responses shift by more than 30 per cent simply through question order. This is one of the few market research/survey design texts where the writing is cogent and clear: written in a style that I'd describe as colleague to colleague. Bravo! What a difference this makes. I consequently rate this book right up there with the excellent Scott Plous book, Psychology of Judgment & Decision Making as one of the two most essential backgrounders for survey designers and questionnaire writers. We ignore respondent biases at our peril: this volume specifically shows us how to write more reliable, less ambiguous questions - and how to interpret the sometimes unexpected results we receive for our efforts.

An extremely useful integration

This book is very well written and researched and is a must for everyone who wants to learn more about serious social science research.

Very thoughtfully written

I've enjoyed this edition a lot. The authors incorporate the essential psychological elements with survey methodology nicely. I'd highly recommend this book to people in the survey research field.