Two new books worth a look or maybe owning

In the last month or so two good books on Web survey design have appeared on the scene.

The first is Designing Effective Web Surveys by Mick Couper.  In the interest of full disclosure I admit that Mick is a good and long time friend with whom we have done a lot of work over the last five years, but I urge anyone who works with Web surveys to get hold of this book because it's a terrific overview of the key elements of Web survey design.  There may be a few things here and there that I disagree with, but Mick pretty much always has the data on his side.  But as Mick warns in the preface, it's not a cookbook.  It was, after all, Mick who taught me that the answer to every methodological question is, "It depends."

The second book is a follow-up of sorts to an earlier book by Don Dillman.  This time he has teamed up with two of his graduate students to produce a third edition of Internet, Mail, and Mixed Mode Surveys.  For those of you who don't know Don, he is THE mail survey guru who virtually invented how mail surveys are done.  So it was something of a natural for him to move from one self-administered mode to another.  Along the way he has done a lot of good work on questionnaire design and recently has become very interested in mixed mode.  I've not seen the book but knowing the people involved it's probably worth a very close look.

Sadly, both of these books are pricey. The Couper book is $125 in hardcover,although a paperback is available.