Responsive Split Questionnaire Survey Design for the Estimation of Tourist Expenditure

Abstract

This survey design is motivated by the need to address the consequences such as non-response, high respondent burden and poor data quality, that lengthy surveys are often associated with. Responsive split design is a survey design technique that directly addresses these consequences. The objective of this study was to reduce the respondent burden and to increase the response rate by using the Split Questionnaire Design (SQD). We leveraged on the idea of issuing only relevant surveys to each respondent as this directly reduces the connotation of being probed with irrelevant questions which is regarded as a primary reason for non-response. To achieve this, we developed a responsive design by utilising the prior information that we collected as part of the questionnaire, and then created decision rules for the administration of the relevant micro-surveys. The results that we have attained are promising in terms of the trade-off between precision and responsiveness. The responsive design offered the advantage of being more responsive to the tourist and was able to detect rare expenditures. This suggests that the responsive design provides improvements in issues regarding missing and rare events. Besides meeting the objectives, we also demonstrated that a secondary advantage of responsive split questionnaires also brings about significant cost savings to the survey organisation.