Krosnick's Forthcoming Survey Design Handbook

There's a nice preview of Jon Krosnick's forthcoming survey design handbook at the link below. Krosnick, whom I was fortunate enough to study with at the Summer Institute in Political Psychology, has done the research to give what I think will be definitive answers on design conundrums such as providing (or not) a "don't know" option. I've often been frustrated by the lack of a one-stop how-to on rigorous survey design, so I can hardly wait for his book.

Harvard University Program on Survey Research at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science

The conference centered around the research Krosnick has done into a century's worth of survey methodology studies for his forthcoming book, The Handbook of Questionnaire Design: Insights from Social and Cognitive Psychology ( Oxford ).

Surveys have been an investigative staple since the earliest years of the social sciences. But surprisingly, though most research-methods textbooks include informal discussions of questionnaire design, they tend to treat it as an intuitive art rather than a scientific skill governed by formal rules for optimizing data quality.

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Another surprising result involves "don't know" responses. Many researchers have presumed for decades that it is wise to offer a "don't know" option to respondents, because many people genuinely lack the information necessary to answer some survey questions. But Krosnick found instead that offering a "don't know" option mostly lures people who have real opinions to decline to answer, as a way to minimize the effort they devote to the process. By omitting the "don't know" option, researchers can measure the real opinions held by more people.