Chapter 10 Web Resources

1. Tools for Conducting and Evaluating Surveys

SurveyMonkey^TM (https://www.surveymonkey.com)

For small-scale Internet surveys, SurveyMonkey^TM offers a free tool to create and send a survey instrument to a sample of respondents. Note, however, that the free account is limited to a maximum of 10 questions and 100 respondents.

Best Practices for Survey Research (http://www.aapor.org/Standards-Ethics/Best-Practices.aspx)

This page from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) offers a detailed list of standards or criteria for conducting high quality surveys. This is a good check list for anyone doing survey research.

2. Surveys and Opinion Polls as Question Sources

PollingReport.com (http://www.pollingreport.com/)

This site is an excellent, nonpartisan resource on trends in American public opinion. Users can click on a wide range of subject areas to find the exact questions and polling results from national surveys.

Polling Data Topics (https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/topics-glance/)

This page from the Roper Center contains a list of topics linked to a sampling of questions that are stored in the Center’s archive. The archive contains survey questions and results from academic, commercial, and media survey organizations such as the GSS, Pew Research Center, Yankelovich Research Partners, and Wall Street Journal.

General Social Survey (http://gss.norc.org/)

The home site of the GSS contains information about the project and links to the GSS Codebook and data. The Codebook is a rich source of questions on background variables, attitudes, opinions, and various social indicators.

Public Opinion Surveys (http://www.ciser.cornell.edu/info/polls.shtml)

Part of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research, this page contains an annotated list of online sites for opinion polls and surveys. The sites provide various resources, including survey questions, datasets, and full-text reports.