WBG Pioneer - LSMS Survey Innovation Fellow

The Development Economics Survey Unit (DECSU) in the World Bank Group’s Development Economics Vice Presidency supports the production and use of high-quality household survey data in low- and middle-income countries. Through the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) program, DECSU advances methodological innovation in household survey design, implementation, and data quality, with a focus on improving the evidence available for development policy and research. As part of this agenda, DECSU is implementing a randomized survey experiment to generate rigorous evidence on survey measurement error and the role that data collection mode plays in shaping the quality of household survey data. Set in Bangladesh, it directly compares phone and face-to-face interviews across the same variables to assess the fitness of phone surveys as a high-quality data collection instrument, responding to a growing need for evidence-based guidance on maintaining data quality in contexts where remote surveying is increasingly used. Duties and Responsibilities The Fellow will be part of the team supporting an ongoing randomized survey experiment in Bangladesh. The study is designed to allow for systematic decomposition of survey measurement error. Key design features include: (i) multiple embedded randomized experiments within a multi-round panel survey of 1,500 households to isolate distinct sources of measurement error driven by both respondents and enumerators; (ii) concurrent phone and face-to-face interviews on identical socioeconomic variables, enabling direct mode comparisons; (iii) objective benchmarks to establish ground truth; (iv) within-household respondent comparisons; and (v) audio recording of all interviews to support data quality assurance and deeper analytical work. The assignment will contribute to the World Bank’s research agenda on survey measurement error and the role that data collection mode plays in shaping the quality of household survey data. It will also provide the Fellow with practical experience in survey methodology, field experiment implementation, data quality monitoring, and applied quantitative research. The scope of work includes supporting questionnaire refinement, survey implementation, data quality monitoring, and data analysis. The Fellow may also contribute to research outputs and develop an independent research question using project data, in consultation with the research team.