Finding Survey Questionnaires Subject Guide

Finding Survey Questionnaires

Updated by John Prechtel, Data Librarian, February 28, 2007

This guide covers some ways to access questionnaires for opinion polls and social surveys. For information about finding educational and psychological test instruments, see Finding Tests and Test Information in the UGA Libraries

1. Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science Public Opinion Poll Question Database

Restrictions: None.
Contents: Questions from the Louis Harris polls, the Carolina Poll, and a few other poll series. Topics are fairly diverse and include some regional (southern) focus. Covers 1960s forward.
Searching: Fielded Boolean searching with several limit filters.
How to find the questionnaire: Under each question in the hit list you can click on Get all the questions. This produces a page giving you the size of the questionnaire file you are about to download/open. Proceed to download/open the file. These files can be rather large, so before printing the entire questionnaire, you should take note of how long it is.

2. ICPSR archive

Restrictions: Questionnaires, if they exist, are usually freely accessible. Users will need to submit their email address during the process.
Contents: Several thousand studies ranging from opinion polls to very complex longitudinal surveys contributed by survey research institutes, academic researchers, news organizations, and government agencies. Some international coverage. Subjects cover a wide array of social sciences, especially political science and sociology. The questionnaire--if available--is usually part of the documentation, a.k.a. "codebook". Most documentation has now been digitized. A selective collection of printed ICPSR codebooks is also available in the Main Reference room. There are also many ICPSR codebooks in the general collection.
Searching:

Search the archive's holdings by keyword/phrase in title, summary, author (principal investigator), ICPSR study number. Advanced search allows some quasi-Boolean control.
Browse by ICPSR subject categories
A thesaurus provides controlled subject and geographic name access to the studies, more detailed than the ICPSR subjects.

How to find the questionnaire:
A. Identify a study of interest using the finding tools.
B. Click on the ‘downloads’ link in the hit list or on the description page. You will be prompted for an email address. You will also be asked some additional questions which you may decline to answer.
C. At the ‘Browse and Download’ page, scroll down a bit until you get to a section with the header 'Machine-readable Codebooks and Documentation - Freely Available'. Look for a file identified as the questionnaire. If present, download/open it. If not present, then download/open whatever documentation file is there. The files will either be pdf or plain text format.
D. Once you have opened up a documentation file look for a questionnaire section. If this doesn’t work, look for a section called codebook. Look in other sections if necessary. The questionnaire may be integrated into other kinds of information. For some studies there may be no questionnaire.

3. iPoll database of poll questions (Roper Center)

Restrictions: UGA faculty, students, staff only. Accessible from campus IP addresses.
Contents: Questions from thousands of opinion polls on a wide variety of topics. Includes Gallup Polls and others. Coverage is 1940s to the present.
Searching: Simple keyword and phrase searching. A list of topics is also available. Users can limit by organization or date as well as sort results.
How to find the questionnaire: When you find a question(s) of interest, click view. Then click on the poll title. This will produce what is called the Full Release Question List. That’s your questionnaire for this poll. These lists are obviously not facsimiles of what the pollsters used and they don’t provide information on skip patterns etc., but they include all the questions asked. To see the responses you must click view by each question.

4. Government survey questionnaires:

GIL Catalog.
From the more options search screen, set limits to Location: "Government Documents Main" and then search on the keyword "questionnaire" and other subject terms such as education or health. Questionnaires are often included in the survey documentation released by government agencies, and the term questionnaire may appear in the catalog record.

Census 2000 population and housing questionnaires at the Census Bureau web site.

Bohme, Frederick G. 200 years of U.S. census taking : population and housing questions, 1790-1990. (J84: C 3.2:T 93 Main Ref, Census Collection)
Contains all census questionnaires and census schedules used in each decennial census through 1990.

Bureau of Census forms (2nd floor Census Collection, Folio J84 C3.272:[various numbers] ).
Individual forms/questionnaires used in many different government sponsored surveys conducted by the Census Bureau during the past couple of decades. Unfortunately there is no index to these forms.