The is the title of a book I have mentioned before in another context. But before I go further I acknowledge that the lead author (Roger Tourangeau) is an old friend; one co-author (Ken Rasinski) is a former colleague; and the other co-author (Lance Rips) just has a very cool name for a guy in the survey biz. None of this has anything to do with why I like this book. I like this book because I firmly believe that if everyone read it we would be designing much better questionnaires that would do a much better job of getting our clients better answers to the questions they have.
The goal of the book is to advance "a theory about how respondents answer questions in surveys." It deals with memory, with avoiding bias in question writing, with how to elicit both factual and attitudinal information, and how mode affects response. It reviews the relevant psychological literature and its application to surveys. In a nutshell, it places questionnaire design into the context of what we know about how people think and react. Good stuff that we all should know and very readable to boot.