Fifty years of survey innovation

Abstract

While completing my PhD in sociology, I did not anticipate spending most of my academic career researching ways to improve methods for doing sample surveys. At that time, I was dedicated to understanding community organization and how people adopt the use of new technologies. This article describes how becoming a new assistant professor just prior to a university crisis turned my academic interests away from organizational behavior toward more than five decades of research to advance survey methodology in step with technological changes transforming the world. This process also turned upside down my thoughts on how to do research. Increasingly I was inspired by the work of survey designers in government and private sector organizations who needed help with improving their survey designs. These experiences led to the creation of a series of innovations: telephone and mail data collection methods, mixed-mode surveying, tailored design for different survey situations, data collection over the internet, unified construction of questionnaires across survey modes, and understanding the differences between answers given to aurally vs. visually delivered survey questions. This sequence of research efforts led to the development and testing of web-push procedures that are now replacing the use of telephone survey methods throughout the world. Yet frequently and at unexpected times, my education in social organization and technology issues provided much needed guidance for thinking beyond the constraints of current survey methods and the possibilities that new methods could provide.