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Introductory Overview Lecture: Introduction to Business Surveys - Questionnaire Design

Questionnaire Completion Paradata in Business Surveys (308246)

*Ger Snijkers, Statistics Netherlands 
Susan Demedash, Statistics Canada 
Jessica Andrews, Statistics Canada 

After a business questionnaire has been carefully designed, as discussed in the first lecture in this IOL session, the question remains: does the questionnaire work in practice as intended? Does the questionnaire result in the data quality we want? Especially when the completion process can be complex, like in businesses.

To answer this question, the survey data can be validated in the data cleaning stage, by using historic data, other data sources, and re-contacting businesses. However, when using electronic questionnaires another data source is available to evaluate the data quality: questionnaire completion paradata, like log files, keystroke data, or audit trails. These paradata provide information on how the questionnaire was actually completed step by step.

In this lecture, we’ll start by discussing paradata in general. Then we’ll focus on questionnaire completion paradata: what these data are, what they tell us, how these data can help to get better insights in issues in questionnaires? We’ll illustrate this with a number examples from Statistics Canada and Statistics Netherlands. Also we’ll discuss how these data can be collected, and how to analyze these data.