The Survey Resources Network (SRN) Question Bank provides access to questionnaires from a range of major UK and cross-national social surveys. A search of the questionnaires displays questions in their original context helping with questionnaire design and methods research and teaching.

The Survey Question Bank provides access to questionnaires, and other survey documents, from a range of major UK and cross-national social surveys conducted, for the most part, since the mid-1990s. These documents - which are in PDF format and fully searchable - are displayed in their original form, allowing users to better understand the context in which a particular question was asked.

The Survey Question Bank also writes and commissions a series of methods fact sheets and topic overviews - vital to making sense of the questions and the data created from them. These commentaries are authored by experts in their field and are designed to get users started in a particular area and to lead to further reading.

The service is aimed at a range of different user communities: social and economic researchers, wishing to locate survey questions and questionnaires as part of their 'pre-analysis'; commissioners/managers of social research, working in all sectors, interested in seeing whether and how questions on their topics of interest have been framed in other surveys; and teachers of survey methods with a specific interest in questionnaire design/methodology.

The Survey Resources Network:

• provides, via the Survey Question Bank, extensive online resources for survey researchers, building upon and extending the former ESRC Question Bank, and linking to training and methodological research
• provides, via the Survey Skills Programme, broad training opportunities in survey skills, with a practical focus, delivered in a flexible way so that each trainee can tailor a package of elements to suit their own needs and constraints
• via the Survey Design and Measurement Initiative, identifies and exploits synergies and complementarities between ESRC-funded survey methods research projects, thereby adding value by means such as co-ordinated dissemination
• explores, via the Survey Management Systems project, the potential for improving the efficiency and quality of data collection in the UK via survey data management processes
• co-ordinates with international organisations and networks and provides strategic advice to the ESRC regarding survey research methods

The service is managed and co-ordinated from the University of Essex with five other academic centres as partners: Institute for Social and Economic Research; National Centre for Social Research; The Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the University of Southampton; Institute of Education; and the UK Data Archive.

Archive contribution

The UK Data Archive designs and delivers the Survey Question Bank, as well as co-ordinating the overall Survey Resources Network website. Members of the Archive also present on the Survey Skills Programme of workshops and sit on the Network's management board.

Principal investigator:  Peter Lynn
Funder: ESRC
Dates: January 2008
Contact:  Survey Resources Network
Links:  Survey Question Bank