Introducing Survey Practitioner’s Corner
November 02, 2026
Over the past several years, we in the Atlanta Fed's Economic Survey Research Center have been fortunate to use our survey work to help answer some important economic and policy questions.
Significantly, we created a novel measure of firm-level uncertainty and used it to better understand ways business decision-makers encountering uncertainty form expectations. Many other central banks (such as the Bank of England, the Bundesbank, and the Bank of Canada) and agencies, including the Census Bureau, have emulated this approach.
In addition, we've created a unique measure of business execs' unit-cost expectations that is particularly useful in gauging the inflationary environment, especially when compared to standard aggregate inflation expectations. We have also elicited own-firm price expectations from CFOs that appear quite useful in predicting core inflation.
Our firm-level survey insights proved to be particularly useful during the dramatic spike in uncertainty triggered by the pandemic and the accompanying surge in inflation that followed a period of significant financial support for the economy amid unprecedented supply constraints.
Through our surveys, we have also helped inform policymakers and economists not only about which payment methods (including cash and noncash alternatives, credit cards, debit cards, checks, and crypto) consumers use, but also how and when they use them. Our payments work informs policy work on financial inclusion and the penny debate and has served as a basis for research on household financial dynamics and how consumers adapted their payment choices during the pandemic. You can view the results from the 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, along with tables, interactive charts, and microdata.
Our survey team has also had its share of what could charitably be called "learning experiences," where questions, modules, and analysis didn't deliver results quite as useful as we would have liked. (Fortunately, these ended up on the cutting-room floor, so you'll have to ask me or my team about them next time you see us.)
Unveiling Survey Practitioner's Corner
Now, we'd like to give economists and (especially) survey researchers—and anyone else interested, really—a peek behind our curtain. At Survey Practitioner's Corner, we'll share how our methods have evolved, how we recruit businesses into our panel, some of the question designs that have (and haven't) worked, our experiences with different analytical techniques (such as using LLMs to evaluate and classify qualitative text data), and a whole host of other facets of our work. In short, rather than focusing on the "what," Survey Practitioner's Corner focuses on the "how" we use to arrive there.
By going behind the scenes in this way, we hope to create a dialog between our group and other survey methodologists and researchers interested in applying rigorous survey methods to economics. While we hope to impart useful insight and advice to further your efforts, we know that such exchanges are a two-way street. Although the Atlanta Fed has been conducting economic surveys for about 15 years, there's a lot we haven't learned yet; we're eager to incorporate expertise that you and others in the survey community have acquired and would share with us. So please visit our Survey Practitioner's Corner, and if you're interested in what you see—or if you want to share a better approach you've learned—drop us a note. We look forward to having a conversation with you.