Survey Research for Public Administration.

• Author: O'Toole, Daniel E.

Folz, David H.

Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 1996. (191 pp)

Reviewed by Daniel E. O'Toole, professor, Division of Public Administration, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon.

In public organizations, an important prerequisite for making informed decisions about key policy choices is the availability of accurate information about citizens' needs, preferences, and perceptions. Such information can help identify significant strengths, limitations, and necessary changes in the jurisdiction's current service delivery system. Survey Research for Public Administration is a resource for public managers when they decide to obtain this information via surveys.

Folz targets this book to public administrators who need to be "astute producers and consumers of public opinion surveys" and who do not have a substantial background in survey research or statistics. It also appears to be intended as an introductory text on survey research for public administration students.

The author's basic premises are that a survey should be done right or not at all and that "doing it right" is possible within the resource constraints most public administrators face. According to Folz, doing it right involves planning, designing, and implementing surveys using procedures that produce survey questions that are

* valid (i.e., measure what one wants to measure),

* reliable (i.e., have consistent results), and

* useful (i.e., yield the information needed).

The book considers these procedures, discussing some significant uses and misuses of citizen surveys and reviewing the survey research process. Next is an examination of key issues involved in planning the survey, such as identifying the survey's objectives, information needs, and target population and determining the type of survey to use. A discussion of sampling and its application to survey research follows. Then the focus moves to survey design and implementation, including developing and...