EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Measuring consumption over the phone: Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia

Gashaw T. Abate, Alan de Brauw, Kalle Hirvonen and Abdulazize Wolle

Journal of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 161, issue C

Abstract: The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries have made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting household consumption data, which is rarely collected by phone. To test the feasibility of collecting consumption data over the phone, we conducted a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia, randomly assigning households to either phone or in-person interviews. In the phone survey, average per capita consumption is 23 percent lower and the estimated poverty headcount is twice as high than in the in-person survey. We observe evidence of survey fatigue occurring early in phone interviews but not in in-person interviews; the bias is correlated with household characteristics. While the phone survey mode provides comparable estimates when measuring diet-based food security, it is not amenable to measuring consumption using the ‘best practice’ approach originally devised for in-person surveys.

Keywords: Survey experiment; Phone survey; Survey fatigue; Food consumption; Household surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 I32 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387822001687
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Measuring consumption over the phone: Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia (2022) Downloads
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:161:y:2023:i:c:s0304387822001687

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.103026

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 ().

 
Page updated 2024-11-11
Handle: RePEc:eee:deveco:v:161:y:2023:i:c:s0304387822001687