The purpose of this book

There are a number of books available that treat various aspects of survey design, sampling, survey implementation, and so forth (examples include Cochran, 1963; Dillman, 1978, 2000; Groves and Couper, 1998; Kish, 1965; Richardson, Ampt, and Meyburg, 1995; and Yates, 1965). However, there does not appear to be a single book that covers all aspects of a survey, from the inception of the survey itself through to archiving the data. This is the purpose of this book. The reader will find herein a complete treatment of all aspects of a survey, including all the elements of design, the requirements for testing and refinement, fielding the survey, coding and analysing the resulting data, documenting what happened, and archiving the data, so that nothing is lost from what is inevitably an expensive process.

This book concentrates on surveys of human populations, which are both more challenging generally and more difficult both to design and to implement than most surveys of non-human populations. In addition, because of the background of the author, examples are drawn mainly from surveys in the area of transport planning. However, the examples are purely illustrative; no background is needed in transport planning to understand the examples, and the principles explained are applicable to any survey that involves human response to a survey instrument. In spite of this focus on human participation in the survey process, there are occasional references to other types of surveys, especially observational and counting types of surveys.