Leveraging Large Language Models for Survey Research

The recent advances and availability of large language models (LLMs) have created new opportunities for research in the social and behavioural sciences. This project investigates to what extent LLMs can be used to facilitate two aspects of survey data collection: (1) questionnaire development and evaluation and (2) survey interviewing. First, we examine to what extent LLMs can identify potential problems in survey questions compared to existing evaluation methods. Second, we assess to what extent an LLM-based chatbot can collect high quality survey data compared to a standard web survey. Third, we investigate whether the LLMs’ performance can be improved with prompt-engineering and fine-tuning.