Split Questionnaire Designs in Social Surveys: Challenges and Solutions |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Julian Axenfeld (German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin)) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Christian Bruch (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) |
| Coordinator 3 | Professor Christof Wolf (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) |
In recent years, split questionnaire designs have gained significant importance, primarily due to the need to reduce survey costs and questionnaire length. In these designs, respondents do not receive the complete questionnaire. Instead, specific parts of the questionnaire, known as modules, are randomly assigned to different respondents, and the resulting design-based missing values are subsequently imputed.
Applying split questionnaire designs to social surveys raises four crucial questions:
(1) How should questionnaire splits be designed to yield good response quality and appropriate respondent burden while also ensuring imputations of adequate quality that allow valid analyses? This includes issues such as constructing modules and determining which and how many items (if any) should be presented to all respondents, i.e. the size of the core module.
(2) What are the effects of split questionnaire designs on respondent behavior, such as response rates and respondent burden?
(3) How should imputation be conducted under the conditions of social surveys? This involves, for instance, selecting imputation methods and models suitable for small sample sizes, low correlations between items, many nominally scaled variables, and a large number of variables in a survey dataset that need to be imputed.
(4) How should the (imputed) data that was collected by a split questionnaire design be provided to data users so that they can conduct their analyses?
We invite papers addressing the challenges of split questionnaire designs in survey practice, particularly with regard but not limited to the aspects described above. Contributions from fields beyond social science that tackle the challenges of split questionnaire designs are also welcome.