# Survey design and administration

Designing a socio-economic survey including consumption measures for non-displaced households is challenging as the interview time is limited and one has to be very selective to restrict the number of questions in surveys. For FDPs, the challenge is exacerbated given the need to understand not only their present socio-economic well-being, but also their displacement trajectory as well as their aid dependency. In this context, spending 90 or more minutes on an elaborate consumption module might not be a priority. Instead, detailed information on displacement and aid is crucial and something that is not properly assessed in non FDPs surveys.

Fatigue from over-surveying is often cited as an anecdotal challenge in the context of FDPs, leading to survey non-response. Even though FDPs are often subject to intensive surveying by multiple agencies, survey non-response is not as high as for regular populations and the likelihood for a household to be interviewed multiple times is limited. Only censuses interview everyone in the population, they are often prohibitively expensive, and suffer from low data quality outstripping their size advantage. Thus, only few censuses – with very short questionnaires – are necessary for verification exercises. Hence, the chance of multiple interviews for the same households in a short period of time is low. However, refugees do complain about excessive surveying, possibly because contacts with interviewers are not just limited to sample surveys but also needed for a wide variety of purposes related to administering services to refugees.

FDPs are not only particularly vulnerable and need specific protection, they also often originate from a different region in the case of IDPs or country in the case of refugees. This creates several challenges in interviewing FDPs. The respondent might not speak the official language of the country or may not trust enumerators that come from different communities. This can be overcome by assigning purposefully enumerators to specific households to ensure that they speak the same language and share the same culture. However, enumerators should also have a similar cultural background as respondents. Di Maio and Fiala (2020) use a large-scale experiment in Uganda in which enumerators and respondents are randomly paired to explore for which types of questions a significant enumerator effect may exist. While the enumerator effect is minimal for many questions, it is large for specific perception questions, for which it can account for over 30 percent of the variation in responses. Such a bias can also occur for sensitive questions to FDPs including questions on their displacement trajectory, current needs as well as perception questions.

Specifically, in the context of a statistical agency conducting a survey including FDPs, enumerators need to be carefully selected. Refugees might see the statistical agency simply as government that might pass information to other government agencies, potentially threatening their livelihoods. IDPs in the context of an internal conflict involving the government might similarly be reluctant – or even feel personally 12