Designing and Conducting Business Surveys

Designing and Conducting Business Surveys (Wiley Series in Survey Methodology)
Designing and Conducting Business Surveys provides a coherent overview of the business survey process, from start to finish. It uniquely integrates an understanding of how businesses operate, a total survey error approach to data quality that focuses specifically on business surveys, and sound project management principles. The book brings together what is currently known about planning, designing, and conducting business surveys, with producing and disseminating statistics or other research results from the collected data. This knowledge draws upon a variety of disciplines such as survey methodology, organizational sciences, sociology, psychology, and statistical methods. The contents of the book formulate a comprehensive guide to scholarly material previously dispersed among books, journal articles, and conference papers.

This book provides guidelines that will help the reader make educated trade-off decisions that minimize survey errors, costs, and response burden, while being attentive to survey data quality. Major topics include:

• Determining the survey content, considering user needs, the business context, and total survey quality
• Planning the survey as a project
• Sampling frames, procedures, and methods
• Questionnaire design and testing for self-administered paper, web, and mixed-mode surveys
• Survey communication design to obtain responses and facilitate the business response process
• Conducting and managing the survey using paradata and project management tools
• Data processing, including capture, editing, and imputation, and dissemination of statistical outputs

Designing and Conducting Business Surveys is an indispensable resource for anyone involved in designing and/or conducting business or organizational surveys at statistical institutes, central banks, survey organizations, etc.; producing statistics or other research results from business surveys at universities, research organizations, etc.; or using data produced from business surveys. The book also lays a foundation for new areas of research in business surveys.

Table of Contents

1. Surveys and Business Surveys 1
2. The Business Context and its Implications for the Survey Response Process 39
3. Quality Issues in Business Surveys 83
4. Planning the Survey 127
5. Sampling and Estimation for Business Surveys 165
6. Understanding and Coping with Response Burden 219
7. Methods for the Development, Testing, and Evaluation of Data Collection Instruments 253
8. Questionnaire Communication in Business Surveys 303
9. Business Survey Communication 359
10. Managing the Data Collection 431
11. Capturing, Coding, and Cleaning Survey Data 459
12. From Survey Data to Statistics 505