The Ball of Knowledge

A gathering of the entire available scholarly literature on best practices in survey research data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation.

The field is now coming to recognize that questionnaire design is and should be treated as a science, with guidelines for optimization, rather than as an art that anyone can do instinctively. This transition is being energized by the recognition of a huge wealth of knowledge in 100 years of social science literature about how to design questions optimally. Thousands of publications document best practices, especially through experiments that have compared various methods to one another.

But this literature must be reviewed and integrated for researchers to understand and use it. Its findings are scattered across political science, sociology, psychology, economics, public health, statistics, and marketing, published over decades in journals that rarely cite one another. No one has been on duty to gather up this literature and document the lessons learned from it, so that practitioners can carry out their work using methods that will yield the most accurate measurements and conclusions.

We are doing that work. The Ball of Knowledge organizes what the literature has established into a single resource, arranged around the decisions researchers actually face, documented by citation, and constantly updated as new evidence appears. A researcher who wants the short answer will find one stated plainly. A researcher who wants to know how much confidence that answer deserves can follow it back to the studies behind it.

The Ball of Knowledge is also the standard we apply to our own work. It determines which surveys are admitted to Public Pulse reports, and it is the source of the advice we give in consultation.