Disseminating Survey Information in the Networked World: A UK Resource

Survey researchers are increasingly turning to the WWW in an effort to find information for the data collection stage of their projects as well as for the more traditional activity of searching for literature and reports. This paper will discuss the development and use of the Question Bank (Qb), an innovative WWW resource which is used to teach students and researchers about UK social surveys produced by survey agencies such as the Office for National Statistics and the National Centre for Social Research. The Question Bank contains the full questionnaires for over 50 social surveys and is continually expanding. These questionnaires enable researchers to take questions that have been used in large scale surveys for use in their own research work, thus ensuring that they do not spend time ‘re-inventing the wheel’. The Qb also contains information on social measurement in 22 substantive topic areas, and has numerous resources relating to survey data collection methods. The resource is free to all. Introduction This paper is about the Question Bank (Qb), a free UK web based resource which helps to disseminate questionnaire metadata to researchers and students’ wishing to see what has been done before. Contrary to what the title of the 2006 IASSIST conference; ‘Data in a World of Networked Knowledge’ suggests, there is not a huge amount of easily accessible data concerning the network or the knowledge of social science survey researchers, especially those involved with professional survey research. Even fewer data exist on how such students and researchers use the knowledge that they acquire through the Internet. One survey which has studied exactly how students at college use the Internet has concluded that: “Internet use is a staple of college students’ educational experience. They use the Internet to communicate with professors and classmates, to do research, and to access library materials. For most college students the Internet is a functional tool, one that has greatly changed the way they interact with others and with information as they go about their studies.” (Jones et al 2002:2) The question is then, how do we as social scientists or information professionals provide students with relevant and useful information in a user friendly web interface? The Question Bank has attempted to do this since 1996, a time when there were very few online resources available, especially in the survey research world. One notable exception is the UK Data Archive which has been disseminating data since the 1960s, and has had a web presence since 1995. The Qb and the UK Data Archive now work closely together to ensure that the future for UK survey researchers and secondary analysts is one in which a seamless interaction between survey web services is possible. In a previous edition of IASSIST Quarterly, Margaret Law used the phrase ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ (Law 2005:5) and discussed issues surrounding the phrase when dealing with data. The Qb also recycles, but does so with metadata, mainly questionnaires from major UK probability surveys. The idea behind the Qb is that those wishing to write their own survey questions do not have to begin from scratch when there are many questions already in use and the accompanying coding frames and documentation can be easily accessed The Question Bank: A Brief History As stated above, the Question Bank was developed starting in 1995 with a grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The Question Bank was established as part of the UK Centre for Applied Social Surveys1, and sought to contribute to strengthening the quality of UK survey research and in particular to try to improve survey measurement. In addition to providing access to questionnaires, many of which were not readily accessible previously, the Question Bank attempts to present commentary, written by experts, on the quantitative measurement of different survey variables, as well as to provide access to the Harmonisation project of the Office for National Statistics which seeks to standardise survey measurement across government surveys on a number of variables.2 The approach adopted by the Question Bank has been