Chapter 7 Further Reading

Core Survey Methodology Texts

1. Fowler, Floyd J., Jr. Survey Research Methods. 5th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2014.

The most widely assigned introductory text in survey methodology courses. Clear, comprehensive, and accessible to students without a statistics background. Chapters 6-8 on question design and questionnaire development are directly relevant to this chapter. Fowler covers question wording, response options, and the role of questionnaire structure in data quality. Essential reading for anyone who will design surveys professionally.

2. Schuman, Howard, and Stanley Presser. Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Context. New York: Academic Press, 1981. (SAGE reprint, 1996.)

The authoritative academic treatment of question wording effects. Schuman and Presser conducted dozens of split-sample experiments testing different question formulations and documented their effects on response distributions. The "forbid/not allow" experiment, the "welfare/assistance" findings, and the context effects research are all here in their original form. Dense but rewarding; gives you the empirical foundation for the claims made in this chapter.

3. Sudman, Seymour, Norman M. Bradburn, and Norbert Schwarz. Thinking About Answers: The Application of Cognitive Processes to Survey Methodology. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

The cognitive science foundation of modern survey design. Sudman, Bradburn, and Schwarz synthesize research from cognitive psychology to explain why respondents interpret questions the way they do, how they retrieve relevant information, and how they map responses to scales. Essential for understanding why the best practices work, not just what they are.

Wording, Framing, and Political Language

4. Luntz, Frank. Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. New York: Hyperion, 2007.

Luntz is a controversial figure — a Republican pollster whose explicit goal is to identify language that maximizes partisan advantage. This book, written for a popular audience, is valuable precisely because it is honest about how political language functions as a tool of persuasion. Reading Luntz alongside the academic literature provides a useful corrective: his findings about how words activate different considerations are empirically sound even if his applications are partisan. Reading him makes you a sharper questionnaire designer because you understand what professionally calibrated message language does.

5. Zaller, John, and Stanley Feldman. "A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences." American Journal of Political Science 36, no. 3 (1992): 579-616.

(Also listed in Chapter 6 further reading.) This article directly addresses the question of what survey responses measure — and the implications for question design. The finding that survey responses are constructed from accessible considerations, not retrieved from stable storage, has direct implications for every choice a questionnaire designer makes. Essential.

Scale Design and Measurement

6. Krosnick, Jon A., and Charles M. Judd. "Transitions in Social Influence at Adolescence: Who Induces Cigarette Smoking?" Developmental Psychology 18, no. 3 (1982): 359-368.

We list this not for its specific topic but because Krosnick has written extensively on scale design and its effects on data quality. His work on acquiescence bias, optimal scale length, and the effects of midpoints is fundamental to modern questionnaire design. A better starting point is his review article: Krosnick, Jon A. "Survey Research." Annual Review of Psychology 50 (1999): 537-567 — which synthesizes decades of findings on response scale design.

7. Tourangeau, Roger, Lance J. Rips, and Kenneth Rasinski. The Psychology of Survey Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

A comprehensive treatment of the cognitive processes underlying survey response: comprehension, retrieval, judgment, and response selection. More technical than Sudman et al. but more complete. Chapters 4-6 on judgment and scale design are particularly relevant to this chapter's discussion of Likert scales, feeling thermometers, and the psychology of response option selection.

Sensitive Question Techniques

8. Blair, Graeme, Alexander Coppock, and Margaret Moor. "When to Worry About Sensitivity Bias: A Social Reference Theory and Evidence from 30 Years of List Experiments." American Political Science Review 114, no. 4 (2020): 1297-1315.

A comprehensive review and meta-analysis of list experiment results. Blair, Coppock, and Moor synthesize findings from thirty years of list experiments across a wide range of sensitive political topics, assess the conditions under which sensitivity bias is and isn't substantial, and provide practical guidance for researchers deciding whether to use sensitive question techniques. The most useful single reference for understanding when list experiments are worth the added methodological complexity.

9. Imai, Kosuke. "Multivariate Regression Analysis for the Item Count Technique." Journal of the American Statistical Association 106, no. 494 (2011): 407-416.

The methodological foundation for analyzing list experiment data. Imai develops regression-based approaches that allow researchers to analyze list experiment results while accounting for covariates — moving beyond the simple difference-in-means estimator to more efficient and informative approaches. Requires some familiarity with regression analysis; pairs well with the R package list for implementation.

Questionnaire Practice and Professional Standards

10. American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). Best Practices for Survey Research. Available at aapor.org.

AAPOR's professional standards document covers question design, disclosure requirements, and ethical standards for public opinion research. Free and publicly available. Required reading for anyone entering the professional polling industry. Particularly important for understanding disclosure standards — what information must be provided to make a poll result interpretable — which directly connects to the chapter's emphasis on transparency about design choices.

11. Converse, Jean M., and Stanley Presser. Survey Questions: Handcrafting the Standardized Questionnaire. Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications, 1986.

A short, practical guide to the craft of question writing, focused on the gap between what researchers mean and what respondents understand. Converse and Presser's treatment of cognitive pretesting and the development of "standardized" questions through iterative testing remains a model for applied questionnaire work. Good companion to the more theoretical treatments listed above.

12. Pew Research Center. Questionnaire Design: A Practical Guide to Writing Survey Questions. Available at pewresearch.org/methods.

Pew's publicly available methodology documentation includes one of the best practitioner guides to question design available for free online. Written for general audiences but technically rigorous, it covers wording, scale selection, order, and the specific challenges of political polling. Pew also makes its questionnaires publicly available alongside data releases, providing a library of real-world examples of professional question design to study and critique.