Survey Question Bank
Welcome to the Survey Question Bank (SQB), co-ordinated by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex.
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Who is the SQB for?
- social and economic researchers, wishing to locate survey questions and locate questionnaires as part of their ‘pre-analysis’
- commissioners/managers of social research, working in all sectors, interested in seeing whether and how questions on their topics of interest have been framed in other surveys
- teachers of survey methods (see Learning and teaching zone) with a specific interest in questionnaire design/methodology (see Data collection zone)
- Ph.D./postgraduate students
What information does the SQB hold?
The SQB provides access to the questionnaires, in PDF format, from a range of major UK and cross-national social surveys conducted, for the most part, since the mid-1990s. These questionnaires - which are fully searchable - are displayed in their original context, allowing users to better understand the context in which a particular question was asked.
In addition, the SQB writes and commissions methods fact sheets and topic overviews - vital to making sense of the questions and the data created from them.
The SQB does not hold/make available survey data or results - instead try Locate variables.
What is planned for 2010?
A key step forward for the service in 2010 will be a vast increase in the the number of questionnaires that can be searched by users. The SQB will provide access to many thousands of PDF questionnaires from the ESDS collection, thus expanding the scope of those currently available by a considerable factor.
A further innovation will be the ability to move – at the click of a button – from the survey question, to its context in the questionnaire, to the survey results (variable frequencies displayed from the ESDS). Integrating the SQB with the ESDS Nesstar Catalogue will also allow users to make the opposite journey – to locate variable frequencies and then to move seamlessly to the question behind it.
The Nesstar platform will be used to ‘mark up’ information at the question/variable-level, allowing users to locate questions and their underlying data via both free-text searches and thesaurus-aided retrieval.
