Survey Practice Seeks Submissions for Special Issue on AI-Assisted Surveys
07/07/2026
Submission Deadline: November 15, 2026
Guest Editors: Mario Callegaro, Sarah Ball & Leah von der Heyde
Survey Practice is seeking submissions for a Special Issue dedicated to practical accounts of AI assistance across the survey lifecycle. If you are a researcher, a consultant, or work in a survey, market, or user experience organization, this is a chance to share how AI is used in your workflows.
About the Issue
As AI and LLM tools are rapidly developing, there are few practical papers describing how effectively, or not, these tools can help at every step of the survey data collection process.
AI/LLM tools have the potential to support or partially replace three main actors:
- Researchers (including survey designers and analysts), supervisors, and project managers
- Respondents
- Interviewers
Survey Practice is looking for applied, evidence-based papers that show, with concrete examples, how AI tools are implemented in survey workflows, where they have proven helpful, and where they have fallen short. Submissions that document negative results, limitations, or cases where a traditional approach outperforms an AI-assisted one are as welcome as success stories.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Integrations of AI/LLM tools at a specific stage of the survey process (e.g., design, pretesting, fielding, processing, analysis, reporting)
- AI as interviewer: Implementations of AI in independent conversational phone or web setups as well as AI-augmented interview modes
- AI as respondent. Examples include how synthetic data have been:
- Used as a supplement to traditional survey data in pretesting, data collection, or imputation,
- Combined with other auxiliary data sources, such as social media data through tracking or donations, or
- Integrated into longitudinal panels.
- Studies of how AI/LLM tools support respondents in providing higher-quality data
- Applications of AI/LLM in project management and interviewer and supervisor assistance
- Teaching applications, including examples of exercises provided to students or course materials using AI assistance in survey methodology instruction
- Productivity experiments where, for example, groups are randomized to use an AI/LLM tool versus a traditional workflow.
- Practitioner accounts from survey, market research, or user experience organizations describing and evaluating how AI has been integrated into real workflows.
Final submission deadline: November 15, 2026, but early submissions are strongly encouraged. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis and published as soon as they are accepted, in a continuously updated special issue placeholder. The complete issue is planned for May 2027.
Given the topic’s rapid pace of development, the editors are striving for a very fast review turnaround, asking authors to plan ahead so they can return their revisions promptly. For example, in case of a revise and resubmit, authors are expected to send a revised version of their paper within three weeks.
Submissions to the special issue must follow all of the length, formatting, and submission requirements described in the Survey Practice “For Authors” page. When submitting in Scholastica, please be sure to select the Special Issue option. To help us route and track submissions efficiently, we also welcome authors adding the special issue name at the start of the title (e.g., “AI-Assisted Surveys Special Issue: [Manuscript Title]”).
Please direct questions to Mario Callegaro (https://callegaroresearch.com/contact/), Sarah Ball (sa.ball.stat@gmail.com), and Leah von der Heyde (leah.vonderheyde@gesis.org) and copy surveypracticejournal@gmail.com.