implying that the administration of the socioeconomic household questionnaire to a sampled household would cost, on average, $131, and that the administration of the multi-topic individual questionnaire to an adult household member would cost, on average, $23. Constructing the unit cost estimate per minute of data collection promotes comparability in cost estimation given the cross-country differences in questionnaire design - unlike previous attempts that had to report, due to lack of paradata, country-specific cost estimates per completed interview. This approach also allows for a cross-country consistent cost assessment of specific modules and questions. The resulting estimates are helpful in understanding the budget implications of questionnaire design decisions for future surveys.

Finally, we use the paradata to measure the interviewer effects on variation in interview duration. Multi-level models permit the estimation of the ICC, which, through its decomposition, allows us to capture the extent to which the residual variation in module duration is attributable to interviewers. The estimated interviewer effects are significantly larger than the previous estimates from high-income contexts and reveal a high degree of cross-country consistency. The discussion focused on the identification of household and individual questionnaire modules that may benefit from additional interviewer training, fieldwork supervision and data quality monitoring – based on the modules that are among the top 5 in terms of total variance in duration and that register elevated estimates of the interviewer component of the ICC. We see that food consumption, household roster and non-farm enterprises consistently emerge among the top 5 household questionnaire modules in terms of total variance in duration, with 5 to 50 percent of the variability being attributable to interviewers. Similarly, labor, health and land appear among the top 5 individual questionnaire modules in terms of total variance in duration, with 6 to 50 percent of the variability being attributable to interviewers. There is in fact a near-perfect overlap between these modules that are singled out in the discussion of interviewer effects and those that are identified as the top time-consuming household and individual questionnaire modules. And these modules are central to understanding monetary poverty and inequality in these contexts and to monitoring a range of individual-level indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals.

Overall, our findings reveal important insights from survey paradata on module development and implementation, in otherwise understudied low- and middle-income contexts. The type of analyses conducted in this paper can be considered by NSOs and survey practitioners for high-frequency and disaggregated insights regarding respondent burden and identification of priority modules with elevated interviewer effects in duration analysis such that timely training and field supervision measures that can be deployed to minimize these effects during ongoing surveys – particularly in the context of large-scale household surveys that can span up to 12 months in low- and middleincome contexts. Doing so would be in line with the calls for building NSO technical capacity in the use of paradata for household survey design, management, and quality control (Carletto et al., 2022).

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