"Don't touch that ..., you don't know where it has been!": Computer assisted personal interviewing and question recycling

Past survey instruments, whether in the form of a paper questionnaire or telephone script, were their own documentation. Based on this, the ESRC Question Bank was created, providing free-access internet publication of questionnaires, enabling researchers to re-use questions, saving them trouble, whilst improving the comparability of their data with that collected by others. Today however, as survey technology and computer programs have become more sophisticated, accurate comprehension of the latest questionnaires seems more difficult, particularly when each survey team uses its own conventions to document complex items in technical reports. This paper seeks to illustrate these problems and suggest preliminary standards of presentation to be used until the process can be automated.