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The UK's largest digital collection of social sciences and population research data

Survey Question Bank

The Survey Resources Network (SRN) Question Bank provided access to questionnaires from a range of major UK and cross-national social surveys.

A search of the questionnaires displayed questions in their original context helping with questionnaire design and methods research and teaching. These documents allowed users to better understand the context in which a particular question was asked.

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

The service was 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 had been framed in other surveys
  • teachers of survey methods with a specific interest in questionnaire design/methodology

SQB is now incorporated into the UK Data Service.

Archive contribution

The UK Data Archive designed and delivered the Survey Question Bank, as well as co-ordinated the overall Survey Resources Network website. Members of the Archive also presented on the Survey Skills Programme of workshops and sat on the Network's management board.

The Survey Resources Network service was 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.

Principal Investigator: Peter Lynn
Funder: ESRC
Dates: January 2008 - September 2012
Contact: UK Data Service