Prospects of Estimating Poverty with Phone Surveys : Experimental Results from Serbia
Telephone surveys enable us to collect data in a cost-effective and timely manner, but may not be conducive for collecting detailed consumption or income data for measuring poverty due to the required length of the interview and complexity of the q...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/131771508869472557/Prospects-of-estimating-poverty-with-phone-surveys-experimental-results-from-Serbia http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28585 |
| Summary: | Telephone surveys enable us to collect
data in a cost-effective and timely manner, but may not be
conducive for collecting detailed consumption or income data
for measuring poverty due to the required length of the
interview and complexity of the questions. Combining
telephone surveys with a survey-to-survey imputation
technique may be a solution, as this technique can produce
reliable poverty estimates from only 10 to 20 simple
questions. However, this approach may lead to biased results
if the interview mode, that is, face-to-face versus
telephone interviews, affects how households respond to
questions. By conducting the first survey experiment to
examine potential differences in poverty estimates between
interview modes, this study finds that the reporting
patterns changed very little between the two interview
modes, and the bias in poverty estimates due to interview
mode is statistically insignificant. These findings suggest
that poverty monitoring via telephone surveys is promising,
but additional experiments in other country contexts are encouraged. |
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