Editorial: Lessons from the Practice of Household Surveys

Abstract

There is an increasing tendency to use questionnaire surveys in the research of Chinese organization and management. For 2005 alone, a web search generates several hundreds of Chinese language reports and articles based on current and past surveys of various organizations. Many of these surveys, however, lack documentation to show how they were implemented. Following a more careful reading of the materials from three well-known survey series of enterprises, one still has concerns about survey quality, namely the validity and reliability of survey instruments, sample representativeness, and response biases as influenced by internal and external factors of the survey contexts. In this essay, I do not evaluate the quality of organizational surveys, since my limited experience with two such surveys offers no systematic understanding of them. I have, instead, conducted many more household surveys, whose problems and analyses might give hints on how to obtain and improve the quality of organizational surveys. Although households and organizations are two different kinds of units of analysis, survey problems may commonly be associated with (1) sam-pling, (2) survey implementation, and (3) quality control of interviews. ® To elab-orate on each of these three components of the household survey, I will base my discussion on the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), an annual household survey of the country that my sociology colleagues and I have conducted since 2003. At the end of this essay, I will draw from our household survey experiences a few lessons for organizational survey researchers. © 2006, International Association for Chinese Management Research. All rights reserved.