Measuring consumption over the phone: Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia
在埃塞俄比亚城市进行实验，比较电话与面对面调查收集消费数据的效果，发现电话调查的人均消费低23%、贫困率高一倍，且存在早期疲劳偏差，不适合用最佳实践方法测量消费。
The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries have made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting household consumption data, which is rarely collected by phone. To test the feasibility of collecting consumption data over the phone, we conducted a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia, randomly assigning households to either phone or in-person interviews. In the phone survey, average per capita consumption is 23 percent lower and the estimated poverty headcount is twice as high than in the in-person survey. We observe evidence of survey fatigue occurring early in phone interviews but not in in-person interviews; the bias is correlated with household characteristics. While the phone survey mode provides comparable estimates when measuring diet-based food security, it is not amenable to measuring consumption using the 'best practice' approach originally devised for in-person surveys.