31: From Respondent Burden to Respondent Delight

The past two conferences about Survey Methods in Transport (Eibsee, 1997 and Kruger Park, 2001) included special workshops dedicated to the topic of response burden in transport and travel surveys (see Ampt, 2000; Ampt, 2003). In recent years, burden seems to be an increasing concern in spite of the efforts by researchers in transport and other disciplines to minimise it. A general problem, and one that is difficult to address, has been the increasing number of surveys of various kinds, and people may tire of answering them. A second more specific problem is that, particularly in the case of large-scale travel surveys, our field appears to have chosen the ongoing survey as its main approach (Ampt and Ortúzar, 2002). This means that, instead of participating during a well-publicised episodic survey period, citizens may be selected as respondents of travel or other types of surveys on any day of the year, and some of them possibly for more than one survey.