Survey Question Bank

History

In 1995, the ESRC funded the establishment of the Centre for Applied Social Surveys (CASS) which was a collaboration between the National Centre for Social Research, the University of Southampton and the University of Surrey. CASS was funded for two purposes, to run a series of short courses on survey methods and to establish an online questionnaire resource, The Question Bank (Qb).

Following a review and a bid for further funding which was granted in 2005, the Qb then became a ‘standalone’ resource at the University of Surrey with Professor Martin Bulmer as the director. The first project of its kind, the Qb appointed extra staff including a deputy director, Patrick Sturgis, a manager, Julie Gibbs, and four research and support staff.

The Qb aimed, as Adam Guy noted in 1999*, to close the “perceptible gap between sociologists and survey professionals, and between students of sociology and social policy and those who create, interpret and act upon survey findings” by providing a portal where researchers, teachers, students and commercial and government users and generators of survey data could quickly find key facts about a survey’s history, aims and main methods used. The Qb also housed a section on key social science ‘Topics’ which related these topics back to the questionnaires and aimed to have commentary on social measurement written by experts in the field. Later, the Qb added a series of factsheets on survey methods designed to help students.

Selected publications from the former Qb

Qb newsletters

*Guy, A. (1999) Planet SOSIG: Asking Questions - the CASS Social Survey Question Bank, Ariadne, 22. Retrieved June 15, 2009 from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/planet-sosig/

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