Talk or Text? Evaluating Response Rates by Remote Survey Method during COVID-19

Field based research in the era of the pandemic in resource limited settings: challenges and lessons for the future

“…Conducting research using remote methods like mobile phones can lead to a higher non-response rate in the study population (64,65). Response rates ranging from 40 to 55% for telephonic surveys and interviews have been previously reported in literature (66)(67)(68)(69)(70). Higher non-response has been correlated to older, less affluent and less educated individuals, and is found to be affected by connectivity and low internet bandwidth issues too (65)(66)(67)(68)71).…”

“…Response rates ranging from 40 to 55% for telephonic surveys and interviews have been previously reported in literature (66)(67)(68)(69)(70). Higher non-response has been correlated to older, less affluent and less educated individuals, and is found to be affected by connectivity and low internet bandwidth issues too (65)(66)(67)(68)71). This becomes even more relevant when it comes to living in small crowded spaces, joint phone ownership in the family and limited availability of resources to maintain digital connectivity, along with mistrust in unknown numbers and misconstruing calls as being phishing/spam (13,16).…”

Social media as a recruitment and data collection tool: Experimental evidence on the relative effectiveness of web surveys and chatbots

“…Consistent with studies in high-income countries, this paper suggests that web-form data may be of lower quality than CATI data. On the other hand, online surveys of either type appear to reduce social desirability bias (Kreuter, Presser and Tourangeau, 2008;Lee et al, 2019;Amaral et al, 2022), and chatbots excel particularly, which can be critical when investigating sensitive topics. This paper also highlights that using chatbots remedies many observed weaknesses of web surveys in terms of data quality.…”