Satisfaction Survey ResearchCurrent Context of the SurveyPerhaps no other research tool used by social scientists is as sensitive to social and technological change as the sample survey. Survey research is a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States. Surveys provide critical information to government and business decision makers. Polls and their results are widely discussed by the general public and the media. Because of the size, complexity, and cost of major surveys, which can include tens of thousands of respondents and exceed $100 million in cost, surveys inevitably reflect social and technological change. The practice of polling has followed social and technological change in recent decades. The widespread diffusion of telephones throughout American society led to the wide-scale adoption of telephone interviews by polling organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Likewise, the development of information technology has directly led to the development of computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI), computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI), and web-based surveys. Advances in computer and telephone technology have led to developments in survey methods such as email, web-based and interactive voice response (IVR). Public attitudes towards privacy and confidentiality affected participants' willingness to take part in surveys in general. Researchers have seen the rise of telemarketing, along with call screening, as a contributing factor to declining survey response rates over the past two decades. This resulted in higher costs for conducting investigations. The link between higher costs and lower response rates has fueled new theories to deepen our understanding of nonresponse and its implications for the accuracy of survey estimates. Because of the enormous cost associated with using interviewers to administer surveys, there are few reservations that researchers will continue to study how to make them more effective in collecting survey data. These rising costs also create significant constraints on efforts to maintain survey response rates. Along with rapid technological changes, the cost of surveys will likely remain the underlying concern in the search for new and better ways to conduct surveys. Customer Satisfaction Reports Customer satisfaction is a primary organizational survey used by businesses and organizations in the service and commerce industries. Customer satisfaction is linked to customer loyalty, which in turn is linked to profitability. The service profit chain (Heskett et al., 1994) hypothesizes that customer satisfaction (customer loyalty (profitability). The service management literature argues that customer satisfaction is the result of the customer's perception of value received in a transaction or relationship.