"A comprehensive and important review and critical evaluation. . . Clearly written. . . Would make a great graduate-level textbook for a course in questionnaire design and is a must-read for practitioners and academic researchers interested in the cognitive aspects of survey design."

--Public Opinion Quarterly

"For survey researchers, it provides a very scholarly and readable review of psychological theorizing and its implication for survey responding; for psychologists it offers a range of important phenomena that broaden the scope of psychological inquiry. . . . Readers are guaranteed to gain highly useful new insights from the author's masterful integration of research."

--International Journal of Public Opinion Research

"The Psychology of Survey Response provides a masterful review and integration of what we know about survey responding. Written by some of the leading researchers at the interface of psychology and survey methods, this book will be of great interest to survey researchers and psychologists alike."

--Norbert Schwarz, University of Michigan

"The Psychology of Survey Response provides a masterful review and integration of what we know about survey responding. Written by some of the leading researchers at the interface of psychology and survey methods, this book will be of great interest to survey researchers and psychologists alike."

--Norbert Schwarz, University of Michigan

"This is the best and most comprehensive book in the growing literature on the psychology of survey responding. It includes useful summaries of the behavioral science, often providing better exposition than the primary sources, and it draws clear, useful implications for practice. It is a landmark example of the application of scientific theory and laboratory findings to real life problems."

--Reid Hastie, University of Colorado at Boulder

Cambridge University Press Web Site, November, 2002

Drawing on classic and modern research from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and survey methodology, this book examines the psychological roots of survey data, how survey responses are formulated, and how seemingly unimportant features of the survey can affect the answers obtained. Topics include the comprehension of survey questions, the recall of relevant facts and beliefs, estimation and inferential processes people use to answer survey questions, the sources of the apparent instability of public opinion, the difficulties in getting responses into the required format, and distortions introduced into surveys by deliberate misreporting.

1. Introduction
2. Respondents' understanding of survey questions
3. The role of memory in survey responding
4. Answering questions about date and durations
5. Attitude questions
6. Factual judgments and numerical estimates
7. Attitude judgments and context effects
8. Mapping and formatting
9. Survey reporting of sensitive topics
10. Mode of data collection
11. Impact of the application of cognitive models to survey measurement.