Respondent Burden

The degree to which a survey respondent perceives participation in a survey research project as difficult, time consuming, or emotionally stressful is known as respondent burden. Interview length, cognitive complexity of the task, required respondent effort, frequency of being interviewed, and the stress of psychologically invasive questions all can contribute to respondent burden in survey research. The researcher must consider the effects of respondent burden prior to administering a survey instrument, as too great an average burden will yield lower-quality data and is thereby counterproductive.

Mechanisms that researchers may use to minimize respondent burden include pretesting, time testing, cognitive interviewing, and provision of an incentive. With pretesting, cognitive interviewing, and debriefing of respondents (and sometimes of interviewers as well) after the completion of the pretest, a researcher may glean insights into how to reduce any especially onerous aspects of the survey task. For example, it may be possible to break up a long series of questions that uses the same response format into two or three shorter series and space them throughout the questionnaire so that they do not appear and are not experienced as overly repetitive and, thus, as burdensome to complete. With sensitive and otherwise emotionally stressful questions, special transition statements that an interviewer relates to the respondent prior to these being asked may lessen the burden. Using incentives, especially contingent (i.e. performance-based) incentives, as well as noncontingent ones, often will raise the quality of the data that are gathered when the survey task is burdensome, as the respondents will strive to reach the level of data quality sought by the researcher, either because it will qualify him or her for an incentive or because he or she has a heightened feeling of obligation to the researcher to provide good quality data, or both.

Reduction of respondent burden may result in decreased nonresponse both at the unit level and the item level. When incentives are offered, data quality also should increase, as fewer respondents will turn to satisficing strategies to get them through the survey task as easily as possible regardless of how well they are complying with the task.