Response Burden and Data Quality in Business Surveys

Bottone Marco (), Modugno Lucia () and Andrea Neri
Additional contact information
Bottone Marco: Bank of Italy, Via Nazionale, 91, Rome, 00184, Italy.
Modugno Lucia: Bank of Italy, Via Nazionale, 91, Rome, 00184, Italy.

Journal of Official Statistics, 2021, vol. 37, issue 4, 811-836

Abstract: Response burden has long been a concern for data producers. In this article, we investigate the relationship between some measures of actual and perceived burden and we provide empirical evidence of their association with data quality. We draw on two business surveys conducted by Banca d’Italia since 1970, which provide a very rich and unique source of information. We find evidence that the perceived burden is affected by actual burden but the latter is not the only driver. Our results also show a clear link between a respondent’s perceived effort and the probability of not answering some important questions (such as those relating to expectations of future investments and turnover) or of dropping out of the survey. On the contrary, we do not find significant effects on the quality of answers to quantitative questions such as business turnover and investments. Overall, these findings have implications for data producers that should target the perceived burden, besides the actual burden, to increase data quality.

Keywords: Response burden; data quality; business surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/jos-2021-0036 (text/html)

Related works:
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:vrs:offsta:v:37:y:2021:i:4:p:811-836:n:8

DOI: 10.2478/jos-2021-0036

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Official Statistics is currently edited by Annica Isaksson and Ingegerd Jansson

More articles in Journal of Official Statistics from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().