Authors
Dahyeon Jeong, Shilpa Aggarwal, Jonathan Robinson, Naresh Kumar, Alan Spearot, David Sungho Park
Publication date
2023/3/1
Journal
Journal of Development Economics
Volume
161
Pages
102992
Publisher
North-Holland
Description
Living standards measurement surveys require sustained attention for several hours. We quantify survey fatigue by randomizing the order of questions in 2–3 hour-long in-person surveys. An additional hour of survey time increases the probability that a respondent skips a question by 10%–64%. Because skips are more common, the total monetary value of aggregated categories such as assets or expenditures declines as the survey goes on, and this effect is sizeable for some categories: for example, an extra hour of survey time lowers food expenditures by 25%. We find similar effect sizes within phone surveys in which respondents were already familiar with questions, suggesting that cognitive burden may be a key driver of survey fatigue.
Total citations
20222023202432038
Scholar articles
D Jeong, S Aggarwal, J Robinson, N Kumar, A Spearot… - Journal of Development Economics, 2023