Business Commons^™

An Investigation Of Measurement Error In Visitor Expenditure Surveys, Mike Raybould, Liz Fredline

Michael Raybould

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether providing additional prompts in a visitor expenditure survey results in higher reported expenditure.

Design/methodology/approach – Respondents to a self-completion survey of event visitors were randomly allocated either an aggregated or disaggregated expenditure format in a asi-experimental design. ANOVA is used to identify significant differences in mean reported expenditure to the alternative formats.

Findings – The research finds that provision of additional prompts in the expenditure module of a visitor survey results in higher reported expenditures in half the expenditure categories and, most importantly, in total expenditure.

Research limitations/implications – …