Alexander Wuttke

@kunkakom.bsky.social

4188 Followers 2325 Following

Digitalization & Pol Behavior LMU Munich | Registered Reports @ JOP | Democracy and Populist Attitudes | Open Science | 🚵‍♂️🐶

AI Conversational Interviewing: Scaling Up Semi-Structured and In-depth Interviews Public opinion research has long faced a trade-off between depth and scale: standardized surveys enable large-scale measurement but restrict respondents to researcher-defined categories, obscuring the diversity of unexpected considerations that underlie public sentiment. More conversational interviews provide richer insights through open-ended probing, but their reliance on trained human interviewers has kept them difficult to scale. This study introduces AI Conversational Interviewing as a method for collecting open-ended public opinion data at scale, pursuing three objectives: to demonstrate the analytical value of conversational text data for questions beyond the reach of closed-ended items; to assess the method's practical viability through participants' own evaluations; and to inform implementation by experimentally comparing voice-based, chat-based, and free-choice interview modes. We conducted a study combining an AI-led interview with a standardized survey on migration policy among 571 respondents recruited via Prolific and Payback Panel. The findings establish AI Conversational Interviewing as a viable and valuable addition to the social-science toolkit. The conversational transcripts surface considerations and reasoning that a comprehensive standardized battery does not capture such as markedly different mental models of migration among subgroups with similar attitudes levels. Among respondents who completed the interview, evaluations of the AI interview were at or above those of the standardized survey across modes, although completion itself varied by condition. By releasing open data and open-source pipeline materials, the study contributes to a growing literature on harnessing artificial intelligence to expand the methods of public opinion measurement.
LMU CSS Master
New position of Editor for Open Science at the European Journal of Political research (EJPR) At the EJPR we are looking for an Editor for Open Science (EOS) to complete our current editorial team (Isabelle Borucki, Nicole Curato, Caterina Froio, Airo Hino, Alessandro Nai, Emilie van Haute, Markus Wagner). The EOS will join the team as full editor, for the full tenure of the current editorial team (2025-2030). Responsibilities include, on top of the usual editorial activities: developing a new manuscript submission type for EJPR (Registered Reports, RRs), serve as the primary editor for any RRs submitted, and contribute to the development of new author guidelines for scientific reporting and open science practices.