AI-Assisted Conversational Interviewing: Effects on Data Quality and Respondent Experience

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Barari, Soubhik, Angbazo, Jarret, Wang, Natalie, Christian, Leah M., Dean, Elizabeth, Slowinski, Zoe, Sepulvado, Brandon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914175364628480
author Barari, Soubhik
Angbazo, Jarret
Wang, Natalie
Christian, Leah M.
Dean, Elizabeth
Slowinski, Zoe
Sepulvado, Brandon
author_facet Barari, Soubhik
Angbazo, Jarret
Wang, Natalie
Christian, Leah M.
Dean, Elizabeth
Slowinski, Zoe
Sepulvado, Brandon
contents Standardized surveys scale efficiently but sacrifice depth, while conversational interviews improve response quality at the cost of scalability and consistency. This study bridges the gap between these methods by introducing a framework for AI-assisted conversational interviewing. To evaluate this framework, we conducted a web survey experiment where 1,800 participants were randomly assigned to AI 'chatbots' which use large language models (LLMs) to dynamically probe respondents for elaboration and interactively code open-ended responses to fixed questions developed by human researchers. We assessed the AI chatbot's performance in terms of coding accuracy, response quality, and respondent experience. Our findings reveal that AI chatbots perform moderately well in live coding even without survey-specific fine-tuning, despite slightly inflated false positive errors due to respondent acquiescence bias. Open-ended responses were more detailed and informative, but this came at a slight cost to respondent experience. Our findings highlight the feasibility of using AI methods such as chatbots enhanced by LLMs to enhance open-ended data collection in web surveys.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_13908
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI-Assisted Conversational Interviewing: Effects on Data Quality and Respondent Experience
Barari, Soubhik
Angbazo, Jarret
Wang, Natalie
Christian, Leah M.
Dean, Elizabeth
Slowinski, Zoe
Sepulvado, Brandon
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Applications
Standardized surveys scale efficiently but sacrifice depth, while conversational interviews improve response quality at the cost of scalability and consistency. This study bridges the gap between these methods by introducing a framework for AI-assisted conversational interviewing. To evaluate this framework, we conducted a web survey experiment where 1,800 participants were randomly assigned to AI 'chatbots' which use large language models (LLMs) to dynamically probe respondents for elaboration and interactively code open-ended responses to fixed questions developed by human researchers. We assessed the AI chatbot's performance in terms of coding accuracy, response quality, and respondent experience. Our findings reveal that AI chatbots perform moderately well in live coding even without survey-specific fine-tuning, despite slightly inflated false positive errors due to respondent acquiescence bias. Open-ended responses were more detailed and informative, but this came at a slight cost to respondent experience. Our findings highlight the feasibility of using AI methods such as chatbots enhanced by LLMs to enhance open-ended data collection in web surveys.
title AI-Assisted Conversational Interviewing: Effects on Data Quality and Respondent Experience
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13908