Tell Me the Truth – How Burdensome Was This Online Survey? a Look at Self-Reported vs. Interviewer Collected Feedback on an Online Expenditure Diary

• Activity Number: 472 - Paradata and Responsive Survey Design
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 6, 2020 : 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Laura Erhard* and Parvati Krishnamurty
• Companies: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Keywords: Self-Administration; Self-Reporting; Burden; Survey Feedback; expenditure diary; Consumer Expenditure Survey

Abstract

The Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) will complete a large-scale feasibility test of a two-week online diary of expenditures in April 2020. As part of the test, each respondent completing the diary will be administered debriefing questions that include topics on perceived time and burden, experience, and materials. With the expectation that respondents will provide more honest feedback if they self-administer the debriefing, the CE designed a module for the CAPI instrument allowing them to answer questions directly. An option remains for interviewers to administer the debriefing questions to respondents that prefer not to answer on their own, or could not answer on their own due to mode of the interview. The result will be a pseudo-experiment to compare self-administered debriefing questions to interviewer-administered debriefing questions. This presentation will provide an overview of the debriefing questions and preliminary results of characteristics of those who self-administered as well as comparisons between the self-administered responses and the interviewer-administered responses. This presentation will be of interest to survey methodologists and burden data enthusiasts.