Ger Snijkers & Gustav Haraldsen 
Designing and Conducting Business Surveys 

Designing and Conducting Business Surveys provides a
coherent overview of the business survey process, from start to
finish. It uniquely integrates an understanding of how businesses
operate, a total survey error approach to data quality that focuses
specifically on business surveys, and sound project management
principles. The book brings together what is currently known about
planning, designing, and conducting business surveys, with
producing and disseminating statistics or other research results
from the collected data. This knowledge draws upon a variety of
disciplines such as survey methodology, organizational sciences,
sociology, psychology, and statistical methods. The contents of the
book formulate a comprehensive guide to scholarly material
previously dispersed among books, journal articles, and conference
papers.

This book provides guidelines that will help the reader make
educated trade-off decisions that minimize survey errors, costs,
and response burden, while being attentive to survey data quality.
Major topics include:

* Determining the survey content, considering user needs,
the business context, and total survey quality

* Planning the survey as a project

* Sampling frames, procedures, and methods

* Questionnaire design and testing for self-administered
paper, web, and mixed-mode surveys

* Survey communication design to obtain responses and
facilitate the business response process

* Conducting and managing the survey using paradata and
project management tools

* Data processing, including capture, editing, and
imputation, and dissemination of statistical outputs

Designing and Conducting Business Surveys is an
indispensable resource for anyone involved in designing and/or
conducting business or organizational surveys at statistical
institutes, central banks, survey organizations, etc.; producing
statistics or other research results from business surveys at
universities, research organizations, etc.; or using data produced
from business surveys. The book also lays a foundation for new
areas of research in business surveys.

About the author

GER SNIJKERS, Ph D, is Senior Researcher and Advisor in
Business Survey Data Collection Methodology at Statistics
Netherlands, after having held various research and project
management positions. From 2006-2011, he held the position of
Professor of Business Survey Methodology at Utrecht University.

GUSTAV HARALDSEN, Mag. Art., is Senior Methodological
Advisor in the Department of Data Collection and Methods at
Statistics Norway. He previously headed the Division for
Interviewing Surveys and the Division of Data Collection
Methods.

JACQUI JONES, BA (Hons), MSc, is Deputy Director
of the Business Indicators and Balance of Payments Division in the
UK Office of National Statistics (ONS). Prior to this, she worked
in the Methodology Directorate at ONS.

DIANE K. WILLIMACK, MS, MA, is Chief of the Response
Improvement Research Staff at the Economic Programs Directorate of
the U.S. Census Bureau. She previously served as a mathematical
statistician and survey methodologist at the National Agricultural
Statistics Service (U.S. Department of Agriculture).

Additional contributors include Paul Smith (ONS),
Deirdre Giesen (Statistics Netherlands), Li Chun
Zhang (Statistics Norway), and Mike Hidiroglou
(Statistics Canada).