Dear colleagues,

the Mannheim Survey Infrastructure Research (MaSIR) colloquium is finally back! Since we are switching the colloquium online, we are delighted to offer interested researchers from outside of Mannheim the opportunity to participate, too. The next MaSIR talk will take place on October 27, 2020, 2pm to 3pm CET.

Konstantin Gavras (University of Mannheim) will be talking about “New Avenues in Survey Data Collection: Investigating Linguistic and Content Characteristics of Text and Voice Answers to Political Attitude Questions”. Please find the details of the meeting below:

Title: "New Avenues in Survey Data Collection: Investigating Linguistic and Content Characteristics of Text and Voice Answers to Political Attitude Questions" Who: Konstantin Gavras (University of Mannheim) When: October 27, 2020, 2pm to 3 pm CET Where: Zoom

If you want to attend the colloquium, please write an email with header "MaSIR" to sfbconfe@mail.uni-mannheim.de and we will email you the Zoom link and password.

Abstract: The rapid increase of smartphone surveys and technological developments open novel opportunities for measuring political attitudes. One avenue is the use of open questions with requests for voice instead of text answers, which may facilitate the answer process and result in more in-depth and unfiltered information. However, so far, the pertinent literature lacks studies investigating the characteristics of text and voice answers. In this study, we therefore compare the linguistic and content characteristics of text and voice answers to political attitude questions. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in a smartphone survey (N = 2,402) and randomly assigned respondents to a request condition (i.e., text or voice). Voice answers were recorded via the JavaScript- and PHP-based "SurveyVoice (SVoice)" tool developed by Höhne, Gavras, and Qureshi (forthcoming), resembling the voice messaging option of Instant-Messaging Services. The results reveal that text and voice answers substantially differ from each other. More specifically, they result in different lengths, lexical structures, sentiments, and topics. It seems that text answers are characterized by an intentional and conscious answering, whereas voice answers are characterized by an intuitive and spontaneous answering. Overall, open questions with requests for voice instead of text answers represent a promising way of measuring respondents' political attitudes.

We look forward to seeing you! Don't forget to register via email to sfbconfe@mail.uni-mannheim.de!

Carina Cornesse (University of Mannheim) Ines Schaurer (GESIS Panel) Annelies Blom (University of Mannhei) Bernd Weiß (GESIS Panel) Florian Keusch (University of Mannheim)