ABSTRACT
In this chapter we shall consider the role that surveys and questionnaires have to play in political research. If we want to find out about political attitudes, and we want to know about a group of people rather than just a small number of individuals, we are likely at some point in our research to make use of survey data (which we may have collected ourselves or which may have been collected by others). The founding fathers of social research surveys in Britain were Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree (with their studies of poverty commencing in the late nineteenth century) and A.L. Bowley’s study of working-class conditions which began in 1912 (Broughton, 1995, p. 3). The development of research tools such as sampling (see Chapter 2) allowed researchers to progress beyond the need for exhaustive surveys (Fielding and Gilbert, 2000, p. 225).
