Assessing Response Fatigue in Phone Surveys : Experimental Evidence on Dietary Diversity in Ethiopia
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred interest in the use of remote data collection techniques, including phone surveys, in developing country contexts. This interest has sparked new methodological work focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of d...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/526651618930138065/Assessing-Response-Fatigue-in-Phone-Surveys-Experimental-Evidence-on-Dietary-Diversity-in-Ethiopia http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35483 |
| Summary: | The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred
interest in the use of remote data collection techniques,
including phone surveys, in developing country contexts.
This interest has sparked new methodological work focusing
on the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of
remote data collection, the use of incentives to increase
response rates, and how to address sample
representativeness. By contrast, attention given to
associated response fatigue and its implications remains
limited. This study designed and implemented an experiment
that randomized the placement of a survey module on women’s
dietary diversity in the survey instrument. The study also
examines potential differential vulnerabilities to fatigue
across food groups and respondents. The findings show that
delaying the timing of mothers’ food consumption module by
15 minutes leads to 8-17 percent decrease in the dietary
diversity score and a 28 percent decrease in the number of
mothers who consumed a minimum of four dietary groups. This
is driven by underreporting of infrequently consumed foods;
the experimentally induced delay in the timing of mothers’
food consumption module led to decreases of 40 and 11
percent in the reporting of consumption of animal source
foods and fruits and vegetables, respectively. The results
are robust to changes in model specification and pass
falsification tests. Responses by older and less educated
mothers and those from larger households are more vulnerable
to measurement error due to fatigue. |
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