Survey Methodology

Survey Methodology, by Robert M. Groves, Floyd J. Fowler Jr., Mick P. Couper, James M. Lepkowski, Eleanor Singer and Roger Tourangeau, published by Wiley in its 2009 second edition, is the standard graduate level textbook on how surveys are properly designed, sampled and analyzed, written by a team of leading survey methodologists whose individual research the text draws together into one systematic treatment. Its strength is exactly that collective authority, six specialists each contributing their own area of survey science rather than one author's general summary, making it the reference most survey based studies cite when describing their own method. Its limit is the same as any methods textbook, it teaches how a survey should be properly conducted and evaluated rather than reporting any substantive finding of its own, so it belongs in the atlas only to ground a claim about what sound survey method requires, never as a direct source for a specific religious, demographic or paranormal claim.