Survey Question Bank
Welcome to the Survey Question Bank (SQB). The ESRC Question Bank (Qb) has ceased to exist in its former capacity run by the University of Surrey (see History). The new SQB is co-ordinated by the UK Data Archive (UKDA) at the University of Essex.
The resource can be used to assist with the design of new questionnaires, the search for questions/variables for secondary analysis, and the teaching of survey research methods.
There are currently two methods of searching for information:
- an interface that searches for content across the major UK social survey questionnaires
- a Google search across the whole of the SRN web site
The retrieval of questions and questionnaires is the bread and butter of the SQB. But alongside this functionality, the service provides a number of complementary resources:
- Data collection zone
- Innovation zone
- Scales and instruments zone
- International zone
- Learning and teaching zone
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?
Currently, the SQB's holdings replicate those of the former Qb. The SQB provides access to the questionnaires, in PDF format, from a range of major UK 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, users of the former Qb will recognise many of the survey methods resources - vital to making sense of the questions and the data created from them - that were an important component of the old service.
Like the former Qb, the SQB does not hold/make available survey data or results. That said, there are plans to link the PDF questionnaire documents to variable frequencies provided by the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS).
What is planned for the future?
The SQB will build upon the content and functionality of its successful forerunner. A key step forward for the service 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 available under the former Qb 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.
