The interactions between questionnaire design and cognitive processes underlying reporting are complex. Tourangeau et al. (2000) posit that question answering process involves the stages of comprehension, retrieval, judgment, and response production. Theoretically, questionnaire design decisions place different demands on respondents at different stages (Hess et al., 2001). The literature on substantial questionnaire variation with identical questions given to comparable samples is thin. Beegle et al. (2012), in their comparative assessment of methods of household consumption in Tanzania, find that the recall-based reporting on frequent non-food consumption expenditures is negatively affected by increasing the scope of the food consumption module (whether recall- or diary-based) which is administered prior to the non-food consumption module. Given the questionnaire wording and structure for the non-food consumption module was identical across the food consumption module variants, the authors suggest respondent burden to be the potential culprit behind their finding.<sup>4</sup> The evidence on the presence of respondent burden and its effects on data quality are quite heterogeneous. The documented effects are ultimately context- and subject-specific, but there are several (some experimental) studies that document (i) question/module placement effects, whether earlier or later in a questionnaire (Johnson et al., 1974; Kraut et al., 1975; Herzog & Bachman, 1981; Andrews, 1984), and (ii) motivational under-reporting during personal interviews in responses to gateway questions as to avoid follow-up questions (Kreuter et al., 2011; Eckman et al., forthcoming).<sup>5</sup> If independent samples that are drawn from the same population and that are interviewed at the same time, indeed provide different values for the same poverty proxies depending on whether they were subject to a short questionnaire versus its standard counterpart that would be used for establishing the poverty prediction model in a prior period, it is reasonable to expect that the subsequent poverty predictions could be different.<sup>6</sup> Our study is the first that provides experimental evidence on this possibility, which is implicitly assumed away in proxy-based poverty measurement exercises as long as questions underlying proxy definitions are worded identically across short and standard survey instruments.<sup>7</sup>

> 4 Though not reported in their paper, Beegle et al. (2012) experimented also with the placement of the labor module of the questionnaire, which was put randomly either before or after in 4 of their 8 consumption designs. They looked at whether food as well as total consumption were impacted in each of these four scenarios (i.e. 8 regressions) and found mixed results, with a modest suggestion that both food and total consumption were lower when the labor module came before (i.e. statistically significant effect at 10 percent level in 2 of the 8 regressions). These insights were obtained in private communication with the authors. The experimentation around survey design in their study is not as comprehensive as a shift from a standard to a light household survey would typically be, and the observed impacts could therefore be different.

> 5 The data collection themes across the cited studies do not overlap with those featured in our analysis.

> 6 Newhouse et al. (2014) document a Sri Lankan application in which proxy-based poverty predictions fail to track official poverty estimates. In the urban areas, they identify the cause of the problem as the incomparability of the employment _question_ between their light and standard household questionnaires. Even though our study highlights the potential incomparability of the _data_ by light vs. standard questionnaire treatment, Newhouse et al. (2014) highlight another type of sensitivity of proxy-based poverty estimation to changes in questionnaire design.

> 7 Survey mode does not differ between the light and standard household questionnaires used in our experiment, and we rely on paper questionnaires administered by interviewers in face-to-face interviews. There is a rich literature on the comparative effects of survey mode (computer-assisted personal interviewing in face-to-face interviews,

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