Pictures Instead of Survey Questions: An Experimental Investigation of the Feasibility of Using Pictures in a Housing Survey

Abstract

Anyone with a smartphone can take pictures anytime anywhere. This opens the opportunity for researchers to collect photos to augment traditional Web survey data. We conducted an experimental survey asking 2700 members of the Dutch LISS panel about their dwelling conditions. Depending on the condition, they were asked to either take several photos of their house or answer a set of survey questions about the same topics. This paper documents the feasibility of collecting pictures instead of answers in a web survey and studies the consequences of using pictures/questions or a choice for components of Total Survey Error. We find that respondents in our study were much more willing to answer survey questions than to take pictures, but this difference depended on the difficulty of the topic. We then compare the quality of the data from the pictures of the heating systems with the survey responses. Here we find that our pictures contain more useful information than the survey responses. Overall, we conclude that asking respondents to take a picture within a survey can be a feasible way to collect high‐quality data.

What is the best way of collecting data donations in an online survey? An experiment assessing the feasibility of different data donation approaches to measure mobile and app usage.

“…In a lab-based study, Baumgartner et al (2022) found that 45% of participants, after extensive training, uploaded valid video recordings of their mobile usage for a seven-day period. While specific data on the compliance rates of enhanced recall in the context of mobile and app usage data donations is lacking, Ilic et al (2022) reported a compliance rate of 64.4% for a similar task related to home heating systems.…”

Protocol for a web survey experiment studying the feasibility of asking respondents to capture and submit photos of the books they have at home and the resulting data quality

“…The participation rates range from 10% in the study by Jäckle et al (2019) asking for photos of receipts, to 55% in the study by Bosch et al (2019a) when asking for a photo of the place where respondents are when answering the survey. Moreover, greater item nonresponse has been found when respondents had to answer by sharing images than when using conventional response formats ( Bosch et al , 2022 ; Ilic et al , 2022 ).…”

“…Regarding preferences, to the best of our knowledge, there is only one survey proposing participants to choose in advance between only images or only conventional ways of answering ( Ilic et al , 2022 ): they found that more than half (57%) of their sample chose images.…”

“…The few existing studies have mostly focused on whether the images contained information in line with what was asked. They have found that between 12.5% ( Ilic et al , 2022 ) and 22.8% ( Bosch et al , 2019a ) of the images submitted were off topic. However, research delving into other indicators of quality for image collection through web survey is still needed.…”