Prospects of Estimating Poverty with Phone Surveys Experimental Results from Serbia

Telephone surveys enable us to collect data in a cost-effective and timely manner, but may not be conducive for collecting detailed consumption or income data for measuring poverty due to the required length of the interview and complexity of the questions. Combining telephone surveys with a survey-...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Boznic, Vladan
Other Authors: Yoshida, Nobuo, Munoz, Rodrigo, Katayama, Roy
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C The World Bank 2017
Series:World Bank E-Library Archive
Online Access:
Collection: World Bank E-Library Archive - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
LEADER 01915nmm a2200253 u 4500
001 EB002105022
003 EBX01000000000000001245112
005 00000000000000.0
007 cr|||||||||||||||||||||
008 221013 ||| eng
100 1 |a Boznic, Vladan 
245 0 0 |a Prospects of Estimating Poverty with Phone Surveys  |h Elektronische Ressource  |b Experimental Results from Serbia  |c Vladan Boznic 
260 |a Washington, D.C  |b The World Bank  |c 2017 
300 |a 40 p 
700 1 |a Yoshida, Nobuo 
700 1 |a Munoz, Rodrigo 
700 1 |a Katayama, Roy 
041 0 7 |a eng  |2 ISO 639-2 
989 |b WOBA  |a World Bank E-Library Archive 
490 0 |a World Bank E-Library Archive 
028 5 0 |a 10.1596/1813-9450-8225 
856 4 0 |u http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-8225  |x Verlag  |3 Volltext 
082 0 |a 330 
520 |a Telephone surveys enable us to collect data in a cost-effective and timely manner, but may not be conducive for collecting detailed consumption or income data for measuring poverty due to the required length of the interview and complexity of the questions. Combining telephone surveys with a survey-to-survey imputation technique may be a solution, as this technique can produce reliable poverty estimates from only 10 to 20 simple questions. However, this approach may lead to biased results if the interview mode, that is, face-to-face versus telephone interviews, affects how households respond to questions. By conducting the first survey experiment to examine potential differences in poverty estimates between interview modes, this study finds that the reporting patterns changed very little between the two interview modes, and the bias in poverty estimates due to interview mode is statistically insignificant. These findings suggest that poverty monitoring via telephone surveys is promising, but additional experiments in other country contexts are encouraged