Advances in Business Statistics, Methods and Data Collection

18Using Paradata in Electronic Business Survey Questionnaires*

Ger Snijkers¹, Susan Demedash², and Jessica Andrews²

¹Department of Research and Development (Methodology), Statistics Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands

²Statistics Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

18.1 Introduction

The questionnaire is the survey data collection instrument, with the role of getting valid, accurate, and complete data. To achieve this goal, questionnaire design needs careful attention taking the business context into consideration (Willimack and Snijkers 2013, Haraldsen 2013a, 2023 [Chapter 15], Snijkers et al. 2023 [Chapter 16]). Even after carefully designing and pretesting the questionnaire (Willimack 2013, Willimack et al. 2023 [Chapter 17]), the question remains: does the questionnaire work as intended? Electronic questionnaires offer the means to answer this question using data on the questionnaire completion process. These process data are an example of paradata.

When the questionnaire does not work as intended, this can lead to unintended consequences: additional costs for businesses (response burden), errors in the data, additional costs for the surveyor such as additional questions and complaints from business respondents, and additional data cleaning costs. A study in the Unites States shows that 40% of the total number of resources needed in the production process for five US Census Bureau Annual Economic Surveys is allocated to post‐field data editing and cleaning (NAS 2018); which ...