In the spotlight - ESDS welcomes the Survey Question Bank
Article dated: 7 November 2011
As the Survey Resources Network comes to a successful completion, the Survey Question Bank (SQB) will find a new home as part of the ESDS family of services from 2012.
For those unfamiliar with it, the SQB provides extensive online resources for survey research, building upon and extending the former ESRC Question Bank. The central features of the SQB are its two search interfaces: a PDF document library, covering questionnaires, showcards, advance letters, cognitive testing, interviewer instructions, consent forms and more; and a question bank, containing over 200,000 questions from over 50 survey series.
The question bank offers researchers the opportunity to search for a survey dataset via its constituent questions and is already integrated with the ESDS data catalogue. For example, someone searching for data on interpersonal trust can retrieve all questions that contain the word 'trust' and, from each question, can follow a link to the survey dataset in the ESDS catalogue. Whilst the question bank's coverage is not as extensive as the full ESDS catalogue - currently around 12 per cent of the survey-based studies in the catalogue are included - a much higher proportion of recent (post-2000), major surveys are searchable at question-level, including the British Social Attitudes Survey, the Health Survey for England (and its Scottish and Welsh equivalents) and the Labour Force Survey.
The SQB is not simply another resource discovery tool, however, it also serves a number of other types of user. Commissioners of surveys, fieldwork agencies and survey methodologists can search for questions in order to evaluate them and possibly re-use them. The same users may also search the document library for examples of advance letters, consent forms and to view cognitive testing findings. There is also a section on the SQB site introducing users to the harmonised questions produced by the Office for National Statistics, with links to where these questions have been used in UK surveys.
Over the next 12 months, the question search will be developed further with its contents held in a new metadata structure (DDI-Lifecycle) and the search engine migrating to a new technical platform, Solr. For users, these innovations will allow relationships to be established between survey questions – for example, whether questions are completely identical, whether a question belongs to a wider scale/instrument and whether a question is part of a quality-assured harmonised set. The search process will also be improved with new features allowing users to filter results and search for questions by topic.
At the same time, the SQB will be re-branded to fit with the ESDS look-and-feel and will further integrate with forthcoming improvements to the ESDS data catalogue.
Throughout this overhaul, the SQB will aim to retain its growing popularity. In the year November 1 2010-October 31 2011, the service has attracted over 41,000 visitors (up 18 per cent on the previous year) and recorded around 340,000 page views (up 37 per cent). Users from 193 different countries logged on to the service in 2010-2011.
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