Motivation in business surveys

Abstract Businesses are often legally obliged to report data timely and accurately to the NSIs but they are increasingly reluctant to do so because of allegedly high actual and perceived response burden. Huge reductions in actual response burden that NSIs already achieved have not made similar impact on perceived response burden. Some knowledge has already been obtained on perceived response burden while knowledge on its positive counterpart, i.e. motivation, has still been lacking. The paper thus aims to build a framework for motivation in business surveys based on thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with businesses in the Netherlands and Slovenia. It also suggests several opportunities for NSIs to improve motivation in business surveys. Keywords : individual motivation, organizational motivation, value for business 1 Introduction One of the ten fundamental principles of official statistics states that “data for statistical purposes may be drawn from all types of sources, be they statistical surveys or administrative records” and that statistical organizations should “choose the source with regard to quality, timeliness, costs and the burden on respondents” (United Nations Statistical Commission 1994). Costs and response burden figure as a constraint to achieving high quality of official statistics (Eurostat 2003). In order to mitigate this constraint, NSIs have been replacing some of the direct data collection with more cost-effective administrative data sources. This trend has been further fostered by the Action Programme for reducing administrative burdens in the European Union in January 2007 (European Commission 2010). However, various characteristics of administrative data (e.g. concepts, specifications, periodicity, timeliness, detail, coverage etc.) may not be suitable for users’ needs (Boegh-Nielsen 1997). Taking into account the increasing demand for data, it is obvious that substituting business surveys has a limit. So business surveys remain an