Peter Lugtig on "Smart surveys"

Peter Lugtig is an associate professor at the department of Methodology and Statistics at Utrecht University, where he specializes in survey methodology, which includes inferences using a mix of survey data and big data and the modelling of survey errors, and the use of sensor technology in smartphones. Next to his research, he has a passion for teaching and thus is involved in several Bachelor’s, Master’s and post-graduate courses about statistics and survey methodology.

Webinar content: 

Smart surveys are studies where traditional surveys - questions asked to respondents - are enriched with external data, and data are integrated throughout the data collection process. Smart surveys make use of new technologies such as smartphones of health wearables to collect behavioral data about individual respondents. These could for example be location data collected every few minutes using a respondent's smartphone, or physical activity data multiple times per second using accelerometers on a wrist or leg. In this seminar I will discuss several applications of smart surveys as used in academic research, but will also tell in some detail about projects carried out in a European Context. In particular, I will focus on an ongoing project ' Smart Survey Implementation' in which smart surveys are used to improve the collection of Time Use and Household Budget Data. I will show how design trade-offs in smart surveys are often a lot more complex than in traditional surveys, but also how smart surveys can potentially increase measurement quality a lot.

Participants will learn:

• what smart surveys are
• the circumstances under which a smart survey potentially increases data quality in comparison to a normal survey
• about the trade-offs in data quality and different smart survey designs

Prerequisites and further readings: None explicitly.