AI-Assisted Conversational Interviewing: Effects on Data Quality and Respondent Experience

Abstract

Standardized surveys scale efficiently but sacrifice depth, while conversational interviews improve response quality at the cost of scalability and consistency. This study bridges the gap between these methods by introducing a framework for AI-assisted conversational interviewing. To evaluate this framework, we conducted a web survey experiment where 1,800 participants were randomly assigned to text-based conversational AI agents, or “chatbots,” to dynamically probe respondents for elaboration and interactively code open-ended responses. We assessed chatbot performance in terms of coding accuracy, response quality, and respondent experience. Our findings reveal that chatbots perform moderately well in live coding even without survey-specific fine-tuning, despite slightly inflated false positive errors due to respondent acquiescence bias. Open-ended responses were more detailed and informative, but this came at a slight cost to respondent experience. Our findings highlight the feasibility of using AI methods to enhance open-ended data collection in web surveys.