Evaluation of Changing in Respondents’ Participation in the Surveys of Information and Communication Technologies Usage in Enterprises (ICT) and Research and Development for Business Enterprises (R&D)

Abstract

n the paper we analyzed paradata and metadata of two business surveys: ICT or R&D survey, with the aim to understand the response behavior of the respondents. Starting with a descriptive analysis, we focus on characteristics of the surveys (i.e., number of questions, number of hard or soft prompts) and on the characteristics of the respondents (i.e., number of employees, enterprises involved in the sample in each survey edition) for both the surveys. Then we analyzed response rate by enterprise size, and we propose a set of indicators describing the behavior of the respondent and non-respondent enterprises. We also study paradata of the users as the time taken to compile the questionnaire, online and offline, with the goal to find some actions to improve the participation of the respondents and their perception of the official statistics. For this reason, we also focused our attention on a specific subset of respondents - the so-called "wanted" - the ones who have never answered the ICT or R&D survey or any other Istat surveyprevious year but are missing in the current year. Finally, we apply a logit model intending affect response rate and define what kind of actions can be taken to improve participation.