Design, Evaluation, and Analysis of Questionnaires for Survey Research, 2nd Edition

INTRODUCTION

In order to emphasize the importance of survey research for the social, economic, and behavioral fields, we have elaborated on a study done by Stanley Presser, originally published in 1984. In this study, Presser performed an analysis of papers published in the most prestigious journals within the scientific disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, social psychology, and public opinion (or communication) research. His aim was to investigate to what extent these papers were based on data collected in surveys.

Presser did his study by coding the data collection procedures used in the papers that appeared in the following journals. For the economics field, he used the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. To represent the sociology field, he used the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces and, for the political sciences, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, and the Journal of Politics. For the field of social psychology, he chose the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (a journal that alone contains as many papers as each of the other sciences taken together). Finally, for public opinion research, the Public Opinion Quarterly was elected. For each selected journal, all papers published in the years 1949–1950, 1964–1965, and 1979–1980 were analyzed.

We have updated Presser’s analysis of the same ...