Designing and Conducting Health Surveys. - book reviews

Healthcare Financial Management, Dec, 1990 by Shram Heshmat

Designing and Conducting Health Surveys

By Lu Ann Aday Jossey-Bass Publishers San Francisco, Calif., 1989 Healthcare managers charged with designing and conducting surveys will find this book a state-of-the-art reference for doing their jobs. It is a good resource for those who develop surveys for healthcare market research, strategic planning, and program evaluation.

Drawing on methodological works on surveys in general and health surveys in particular, this text presents a conceptual framework for designing high-quality surveys. It offers examples, applications, and illustrations to help understand the concepts explained. Readers will learn what research options exist and how to recognize effective and ineffective research surveys. To effectively use this book, however, knowledge of basic inferential statistics is needed.

I personally benefitted from this book and will recommend it to my students working on their master's projects. The first four chapters are particularly interesting because the author emphasizes the importance of thoroughly defining research objective(s) before actually conducting the survey.

According to the author, researchers must determine when, where, who, and what the focus of a study will be. The research objective is linked to decision making and truly guides the entire research process.