Are we done yet? Response fatigue and rural livelihoods

Kate Ambler, Sylvan Herskowitz and Mywish Maredia

Journal of Development Economics, 2021, vol. 153, issue C

Abstract: Effective policy requires an accurate understanding of peoples’ livelihoods activities. The data for this evidence is often generated via lengthy surveys where designated respondents provide information about their household members. This burden on respondents may lead to both losses and biases as they grow fatigued during the interview. We test these hypotheses with an experiment in rural Ghana where we randomize individual household members’ position in the labor module. We find that moving a household member back by one position reduces their reported number of productive activities by 2.2% with average aggregate losses of 7.9%, or approximately one out of every twelve activities. Losses for women and youth are closer to one in nine. These biases result from both differential exposure to response fatigue (being positioned later in rosters) and differential vulnerability (greater impacts conditional on position). These results have important implications for data quality across many settings and topics.

Keywords: Labor; Response fatigue; Gender; Youth; Survey methods; Proxy reporting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 J2 O1 Q1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387821001073
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Are we done yet? Response fatigue and rural livelihoods (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:153:y:2021:i:c:s0304387821001073

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102736

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().