Deirdre Giesen

Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek | CBS · Process development and methodology

The time and effort required to comply with data requests can be a real burden for businesses. This burden may appear in terms of time and/or money spent on reporting and in terms of “irritation burden”. Following international and national guidelines on the production of statistics, many governments and statistical agencies have policies to minimi...

This study investigates how an auto-forward design, where respondents navigate through a web survey automatically, affects response times and navigation behavior in a long mixed-device web survey. We embedded an experiment in a health survey administered to the general population in The Netherlands to test the auto-forward design against a manual-f...

Smartphone sensors allow measurement of phenomena that are difficult or impossible to capture via self-report (e.g., geographical movement, physical activity). Sensors can reduce respondent burden by eliminating survey questions and improve measurement accuracy by replacing/augmenting self-reports. However, if respondents who are not willing to col...

Best practice research for testing establishment (businesses and other organisations) survey questionnaires is largely the province of official statistics and has developed more slowly than the corresponding research in household surveys. With a focus on the development and testing of establishment survey question(naire)s, this paper: reviews what...

Managing response burden is key to ensuring an ongoing and efficient supply of fit-forpurpose data. While statistical organizations use multi-faceted approaches to achieve this, response burden management has become an essential element of the strategy used by the U.S. Census Bureau, Statistics New Zealand, Statistics Canada, and Statistics Netherl...

Response burden in business surveys has long been a concern for National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) for three types of reasons: political reasons, because response burden is part of the total administrative burden governments impose on businesses; methodological reasons, because an excessive response burden may reduce data quality and increase d...

In this dissertation we show theoretical and empirical insights into the concept of motivation in the context of the business and organizational survey task. The research has led to a number of recommendations on how to improve organizational survey and communication design to enhance motivation and herewith improve response rates and data quality...

The goal of the research presented in this paper is 1) to develop indicators for the quality of the response to a business survey questionnaire, 2) to explore how these quality indicators are related to characteristics the response process and the questionnaire design. For this study we use the data of the Dutch Structural Business Survey (SBS), a...

summary Response quality affects the costs for data editing and may affect the quality of the published statistics. This paper presents some first findings of a research project focusing on the quality of the raw data (as provided by respondents) of the Structural Business Survey questionnaires. Three types of quality indicators are calculated: ite...

In business surveys, response burden is important from an economic perspective. With respect to quality, perceived response burden is probably more important than the actual time spent on completing questionnaires. From an economic perspective, the reverse applies. Business surveys are commonly considered as a non-profitable cost and a potential th...

National statistical institutes must collect accurate data from businesses in a timely and cost-effective way and without causing too much response burden. An adequate design of the information request is critical in achieving this goal. This paper describes the lessons we have learned about the design of business survey questionnaires from a thoro...

The purpose of the research presented in this report is twofold: 1) explore causes and consequences of response burden in official business surveys and 2) empirically test methods to reduce response burden and motivate businesses for better reporting in these surveys. In the first part of this report, three case studies based on quantitative ana...

Motivation of data providers in business surveys to accurately and timely report requested data is arguably related to their perception of usefulness for the business of the statistics that they contribute to. Evidence from national statistical institutes (NSIs) indicates that data providers to business surveys may perceive official statistics as o...

This report describes the design and results of a survey of 45 NSIs from all European and some non-European NSIs concerning their practices regarding response burden measurement and reduction.

This report provides a review of the most recent literature (2005-2010) on how national statistical institutes (NSIs) measure and try to reduce the response burden caused by their business surveys. The objective of this report is to document and discuss NSI experiences and knowledge in this area. This literature review is the first step of Work pac...

In the past three years, the Questionnaire Laboratory of Statistics Netherlands has used the response process model (Sudman, Willimack, Nichols & Mesenbourg, 2000) as a tool in the evaluation of business surveys. We use the model as a framework to locate sources of response burden and data error. By now we have several dozen case studies with detai...

Virtually all American couples, married or cohabiting, expect sexual exclusivity of one another. This article asks why some people are sexually exclusive while others have sex with someone besides their mate. Previous research has linked personal values, sexual opportunities, and quality of the marital relationship to extramartial sex. This paper i...

This paper describes the evaluation and redesign of the paper questionnaire. We describe how and to what extent various (qualitative and quantitative) evaluation methods contributed to our understanding of the main problems of the SBS questionnaires and how some of the evaluation results could be translated straightforwardly into solutions. We disc...