Comment by xtracto

There are real complexities in designing a survey right. As you say, it's a subject of multiple books and even PhD dissertations.

I worked for 4 years with a team of mainly social scientists (agricultural economists, rural development researchers, etc) for a huge EU project that included plenty of surveys for 6 locations in different countries/languages. The effort to design the necessary surveys right and in different languages/cultures really amazed me. Some of the teams even got (good) papers out of it. There are so many biases that you can have with the wrong questions, groupings or even question orders.

One example I remember is that while in Germany (Altmark region) you could go straight to the people and ask them about their use of policy programme money, what had worked and what hadn't. You could not do the same in Croatia or in Bulgaria (we had study sites in both places), but had to layout questions differently, to get useful answers.