Improving the Use of Voice Recording in a Smartphone Survey

Abstract

More and more respondents are answering web surveys using mobile devices. Mobile respondents tend to provide shorter responses to open questions than PC respondents. Using voice recording to answer open-ended questions could increase data quality and help engage groups usually underrepresented in web surveys. Revilla, Couper, Bosch, and Asensio showed that in particular the use of voice recording still presents many challenges, even if it could be a promising tool. This article reports results from a follow-up experiment in which the main goals were to (1) test whether different instructions on how to use the voice recording tool reduce technical and understanding problems, and thereby reduce item nonresponse while preserving data quality and the evaluation of the tool; (2) test whether nonresponse due to context can be reduced by using a filter question, and how this affects data quality and the tool evaluation; and (3) understand which factors affect nonresponse to open-ended questions using voice recording, and if these factors also affect data quality and the evaluation of the tool. The experiment was implemented within a smartphone web survey in Spain focused on Android devices. The results suggest that different instructions did not affect nonresponse to the open questions and had little effect on data quality for those who did answer. Introducing a filter to ensure that people were in a setting that permits voice recording seems useful. Despite efforts to reduce problems, a substantial proportion of respondents are still unwilling or unable to answer open questions using voice recording.

Innovating the Collection of Open-Ended Answers: The Linguistic and Content Characteristics of Written and Oral Answers to Political Attitude Questions

“…First of all, requests for oral answers result in comparatively high dropout rates (45% in the oral condition compared to 13% in the written condition) and levels of item non‐response (25% to 28% in the oral condition compared to 2% to 4% in the written condition). This is in line with findings reported by Revilla and Couper (2019) indicating that our study is no singular instance. Such an amount of missing data may impact survey outcomes (both from open‐ended questions with requests for oral answers and following questions) and decrease the generalizability of the results.…”

“…For instance, built‐in microphones enable researchers to collect oral instead of written answers. Especially, smartphones facilitate the recording of oral answers to collect rich information about respondents' political attitudes by triggering an open narration (Gavras & Höhne, 2020; Revilla & Couper, 2019; Revilla et al, 2018). Respondents are able to express their attitudes with almost no further (technical) burden; they only need to press a recording button on the respective survey page and record their answer.…”

A New Experiment on the use of Images to Answer Web Survey Questions

“…In particular, smartphone sensors and apps allow researchers to collect new types of data, which can improve and expand survey measurement (Link et al, 2014), and offer the potential to reduce measurement errors, respondent burden and data collection costs (Jäckle et al, 2018). For example, GPS (McCool et al, 2021), accelerometers (Höhne & Schlosser, 2019; Höhne, Revilla, et al, 2020), web tracking applications and plug‐ins (Bosch & Revilla, 2021b, 2022; Revilla et al, 2017) and microphones (Gavras & Höhne, 2022; Revilla & Couper, 2021; Revilla et al, 2020), have already been used in (mobile) web survey research.…”

Completion Conditions and Response Behavior in Smartphone Surveys: A Prediction Approach Using Acceleration Data

“…Smartphones offer many opportunities for innovative data collection that can be used for studying social science research questions as well as for methodological research. Examples include collecting expenditure data with receipt scanning apps (Ja ¨ckle et al, 2019), offering voice input options for answering open-ended questions (Revilla et al, 2020;Revilla & Couper, 2019), and asking respondents to take photographs for supplementing survey responses (Bosch et al, 2019a). Particularly, smartphone sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS, allow the collection of detailed information that can be used to enrich and augment web survey data from smartphones.…”