The Sound of Respondents: Predicting Respondents’ Level of Interest with Voice Data in Smartphone Surveys

21 Pages Posted: 5 Oct 2022

See all articles by Jan Karem Höhne

Jan Karem Höhne

University of Duisburg-Essen - Institute of Political Science; Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Christoph Kern

University of Mannheim

Konstantin Gavras

University of Mannheim

Stephan Schlosser

University of Göttingen

Date Written: 2022

Abstract

Web surveys completed on smartphones open novel ways for measuring respondents’ attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that are crucial for social science research and many adjacent research fields. In this study, we make use of the built-in microphones of smartphones to record voice answers in smartphone surveys and extract non-verbal cues, such as amplitudes and pitches, from the collected voice data. This allows us to infer respondents’ level of interest, which may expand the opportunities for researching respondents’ engagement and answer behavior. We conducted a smartphone survey in a German online access panel and asked respondents four open-ended questions on political parties with requests for voice answers. In addition, we measured respondents’ self-reported survey interest using a closed-ended question. The results show a non-linear association between respondents’ predicted level of interest and answer length. Respondents with a predicted medium level of interest provide longer answers in terms of number of words and response times. However, respondents’ predicted level of interest and their self-reported interest are weakly associated. Finally, we argue that voice answers contain rich meta-information about respondents’ affective states, which are yet to be utilized in survey research.

Keywords: Answer behavior, Interest prediction, Natural Language Processing, Open-ended questions, Smartphone, Voice recordings

Suggested Citation

Höhne, Jan Karem and Kern, Christoph and Gavras, Konstantin and Schlosser, Stephan, The Sound of Respondents: Predicting Respondents’ Level of Interest with Voice Data in Smartphone Surveys ( 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4239005 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4239005

Jan Karem Höhne (Contact Author)

University of Duisburg-Essen - Institute of Political Science ( email )

Lotharstraße 65
Duisburg, 47057
Germany

HOME PAGE: http://jkhoehne.eu/

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Barcelona
Spain

Christoph Kern

University of Mannheim

Universitaetsbibliothek Mannheim
Zeitschriftenabteilung
Mannheim, 68131
Germany

Konstantin Gavras

University of Mannheim ( email )

Mannheim, D-68131
Germany

Stephan Schlosser

University of Göttingen

Wilhelmsplatz 1
Göttingen, 37073
Germany

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