Qualitative interviews offer rich insights into human behaviour, but their lack of scalability has limited their use in economics. This paper introduces and evaluates AI-led interviews as a novel method for collecting qualitative data.
- Speaker
- Date
- Tuesday 17 Nov 2026, 13:00 - 14:00
- Type
- Seminar
- Room
- 4.12
- Building
- Langeveld Building
with Ingar Haaland
Across different economic contexts, a comprehensive set of quality metrics demonstrates the high quality of AI-led interviews. We then demonstrate that AI-led interviews generate thematically richer responses than other survey methods for collecting qualitative data at scale.
A decomposition exercise shows that the benefits of AI-led interviews mainly arise from asking dynamic probing questions. Importantly, AI-led interviews make themes visible that would otherwise be unobserved. These themes matter: We show that responses in AI-led interviews are internally valid and predict future behavior eight months later. Finally, we demonstrate that AI-led interviews allow hypothesis generation about important economic phenomena, reaching thematic saturation in small samples comparable to studies using human-led interviews.
Registration for bilateral, lunch or dinner
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