Ebook: Survey Design and Analysis: Principles, Cases and Procedures

THIS BOOK is the product of twelve years of survey research experience. As the writer groped to apply his training to surveys of many types in a number of different countries, he faced many problems for which he did not have the answers and learned through hard experience some of the analytic principles which he has here presented. Whatever merit the book may have is the product of these years of experience and of the stimulation and guidance of colleagues in a number of agencies. My debt is great to the Pro­gram Surveys Division of the Department of Agriculture and the Morale Divi­sions of the German and Japanese Strategic Bombing Surveys, within which I worked, and to Rensis Likert, head of these agencies, and among others to such close friends and colleagues in these agencies as Richard Crutchfield, Daniel Katz and David Krech. Similarly, my experience in the Surveys Division of the Office of War Information has been invaluable to me and I wish to specially acknowledge my association with Elmo Wilson, chief of that Division and, again, Daniel Katz. My long connection with the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago has been the source of much of my pro­fessional training and I especially appreciate the association with Clyde W. Hart, Director, and Paul B. Sheatsley and Herbert Stember, my co-workers in that organization. Opportunities to practice the trade or profession of a survey analyst also came my way in the course of other research undertaken in Norway, Austria, the United States and Japan and to the friends and colleagues in these undertakings I owe a debt of gratitude. To other friends and colleagues of those years, too many to be named, I am also greatly indebted.

My obligations to my teachers in Psychology and Social Psychology are great. More particularly, my training under F. S. Keller, Otto Klineberg, Gardner Murphy and John Volkmann must be acknowledged.

These constitute the intellectual sources from which this work stems. However, it was Paul F. Lazarsfeld who provided the inspiration for this actual work and the support for the undertaking. In addition, his sensitivity to the unsolved training problems of students and his imagination as to the direction a solu­tion must take was a fruitful source of guidance in the writing of this work. For all these reasons, I owe him a special debt of gratitude. To Patricia Kendall, I also have a special indebtedness. A manuscript which she had prepared on problems of survey analysis was made available to the writer and was the basis for a number of sections now incorporated in the present work, notably in Part III and Appendix D. Her contribution to this volume is so considerable that it is specially acknowledged in the text. While Paul Lazarsfeld and Patricia Kendall are thus responsible for much in this volume, the writer must bear the sole burden for whatever defects remain.

I should also acknowledge aid from Henry Cooperstock in the early phases of the work, and the conscientious labors and assistance of Richard S. Halpern as a research assistant and Mrs. Michael McGarry who did the tedious work of typing the manuscript. I also benefited from the careful reading and criticisms of various drafts of the manuscript by Clyde W. Hart, I. L. Kandel, Daniel Katz, Charles Wright and Hans Zetterberg.
The text makes extensive use of unpublished studies from the National Opin­ion Research Center. Clyde W. Hart was most generous in making his complete files available to me, and again I must express my appreciation to him. I am indebted to Professor Sir Ronald A. Fisher, Cambridge, and to Messrs. Oliver and Boyd Ltd. Edinburgh, for permission to quote from their book The Design of Experiments.