A Systematic and Standardized Burden Measurement System for Business Surveys (303381)

stefania macchia, ISTAT 
natale renato fazio, ISTAT 
angela golino, ISTAT 
pasquale papa, ISTAT 
alessandra nuccitelli, ISTAT 
alessandra nurra, ISTAT 
carmela pascucci, ISTAT 
fabiana rocci, ISTAT 
giorgia simeoni, ISTAT 
*Manuela Murgia, ISTAT 
andrea nunnari, ISTAT 
mariagrazia rinaldi, ISTAT 
carla schiattone, ISTAT 
simona cuomo, ISTAT 
renza mazzucco, ISTAT 
samanta pietropaoli, ISTAT 

Keywords: response burden, business surveys, questionnaire complexity

In the framework of the second round of peer reviews conducted by Eurostat on National Statistical Institutes in 2014--2015, it emerged that, up to now, Istat has collected information about response burden for some business surveys, but not in a systematic and standardized way. It was therefore deemed necessary to define a system of standard indicators to assess response burden on businesses and to constantly monitor it over time to identify critical issues and improve the survey process. The paper will present the ongoing work at Istat on this field.

Indicators will include both objective and perceived burden. In defining the indicators to be regularly produced, the constraint of not causing further burden to business was set up. The information to build indicators will therefore be limited to “time to retrieve information” and to “time to fill in the questionnaire.” Besides, the latter information will be based on paradata generated by the electronic questionnaires, while the former will be collected through a small set of questions to be added to questionnaires of each survey. Questions will investigate on the time spent to retrieve information, on the number of persons involved in this task and on the difficulties encountered in filling in the questionnaire.

In synthesis, a summary report of on response burden will be produced for each survey on businesses as they migrate in the new Business Portal Architecture, containing all the mentioned indicators and further information useful describe the phenomenon.

Finally, the information on burden at survey level will be complemented by the overall burden suffered by businesses calculated considering the ‘persistency’ indicator (number of surveys a single business is asked to provide information for). The latter can be easily derived by the Business Portal Architecture.