Survey questionnaires : data collection for understanding management conditions

This chapter focuses on the use of questionnaire surveys to quantitatively assess how people's attitudes and behaviours affect land use and land management. Questionnaires are an established method of improving our knowledge of how different land users (e.g. small-scale forest owners or farmers) and the public think about, respond to, and potentially evade issues of interest. The chapter defines questionnaires, describes their design, and discusses how questionnaires from different countries or from a regional context can be compared. In common with other chapters in this book, the goal is to clarify the extent to which the methodology can capture varying contexts and deliver an understanding of information about differences in the areas for which the studies are designed. Figures and tables contain examples from multi-national questionnaires about land management and how questionnaires can be used in monitoring