Response Burden and Its Evaluation Methods

Parallel to social developments and increasing use of statistics in planning, demand for producing and disseminating social and economic information have been risen dramatically. Survey sampling is one of the methods of gathering such information. The quality of survey data is important for planners and researches. In recent years, the concept of response burden has been expressed as one of the new components of the data quality. Unfortunately, In National Statistical System of Iran nothing has been done to evaluate response burden in order to improve survey data quality. In this paper, we introduce existing methods of measuring response burden and express other countries experiences to assess perceived response burden in surveys. A common approach to assess response burden is designing a Perceived Response Burden survey and carry it out along with the host survey. In order to illustrate how to design, conduct and analyze results of this survey, a Perceived Response Burden survey which has been conducted in Faculty of Economic, Allameh Tabatabaei University, to measure response burden impose on respondents in Health Survey is presented.