The Practice of Survey Research: Theory and Applications

A comprehensive survey research book that incorporates survey design, implementation, data management, and data analysis, this text is based in sociological research and contains extensive examples throughout.  

This book examines the uniqueness of each research topic and the fact that when doing such research, there is a need to make decisions about the many unique situations while trying to answer the research question.  Each chapter is framed by addressing the decisions that need to be made depending on the various challenges that may arise as the survey study is developed.

Erin Ruel is associate professor of sociology and director of graduate studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. She received her PhD in sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003. In 2003, Erin took a postdoctoral position at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. While there, she continued to hone her survey research skills on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. Soon after arriving in Atlanta to take an assistant professor position at Georgia State University (GSU) in 2005, she began the Urban Health Initiative, a longitudinal survey study of public housing residents facing involuntary relocation with GSU colleagues. Erin was principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health study on the health outcomes of relocated public housing residents and co-investigator on two National Science Foundation grants, examining social disorganization and social support for public housing residents. She employs quantitative and mixed methods to examine health disparities and the health consequences of racial residential segregation, neighborhood disadvantage, housing, and socioeconomic status. Ruel has published in numerous journals, including Demography, Social Forces, Social Science Research, Health and Place, Journal of Housing Studies, Cities, Sociology Compass, Journal of Adolescent Health, and Journal of Urban Health.

William E. Wagner, III, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at California State University-Channel Islands where he teaches courses in statistics and research methods. He has published research on topics such as urban sociology, sports, homophobia, and academic status. He is co-author of Adventures in Social Research, 10E (SAGE, 2018), The Practice of Survey Research (SAGE, 2016), and ?A Guide to R for Social and Behavioral Sciences ?(SAGE, 2020) and author of Using IBM(R) SPSS(R) Statistics for Research Methods and Social Science Statistics (2019).

Brian Joseph Gillespie, Ph.D. is a researcher in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He is the author of Household Mobility in America: Patterns, Processes, and Outcomes (Palgrave, 2017) and coauthor of The Practice of Survey Research: Theory and Applications (Sage, 2016) and Using and Interpreting Statistics in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences (Sage, 2018). He has also published research in a variety of social science journals on topics related to family, migration, the life course, and interpersonal relationships.