Chapter 1
Surveys and Business Surveys
1.1 The Objective of This Book
The objective of this book is to provide a coherent overview of designing and conducting business surveys. Using the generic statistical business process model (GSBPM) as a high-level framework, the book brings together what we currently know about planning, designing, and conducting business surveys, right through to producing and disseminating statistics or other research results from the collected data. This knowledge is accumulated from various disciplines such as survey methodology, organizational sciences, sociology, and psychology. The result is a multidisciplinary process-quality approach. The contents of the book reflect the existing literature (books, journal articles, conference papers, etc.) and the experiences and observations of the authors. The book is intended to help anyone involved in designing and/or conducting business surveys, producing statistics or other research results from business surveys, or using statistics produced from business surveys; and open up new areas for future business survey research.
Businesses are central to a country's economy in terms of both economic growth and maintaining the nation's infrastructure. Because of their importance, data from businesses are needed for national, regional, local, and individual business monitoring, and policymaking and decisionmaking, as well as decisionmaking for individual members of ...
