RDP 2024-02: Valuing Safety and Privacy in Retail Central Bank Digital Currency 3. The Consumer Payments Survey

We included the above question in the RBA's Consumer Payments Survey, which is based on a sample of the Australian adult population that is representative by age, sex, income, location, household internet access, and credit card usage. The survey asked 9,100 Australians to join via random phone number dialling and they were incentivised to participate with a $100 gift card. About 1,900 people agreed to participate, and 997 of those completed the full survey and entered our final sample. Around 95 per cent of participants completed the survey online or via mobile devices, while the rest responded in paper format because they did not use the internet regularly. Respondents completed the survey between October 2022 and December 2022.

For a partial gauge of whether sample attrition might affect the representativeness of the survey, we ran some tests on the degree to which the age, sex, and income composition of the sample changed between the agreed-to-participate sample (1,900 people) and the final sample (997 people). The results show only very slight compositional changes (see Appendix A). We correct for any sample imbalances relative to the population benchmarks (age, sex, income, location etc) using survey weights. But as we discuss with our results, there might be some other imbalances that we cannot correct for.

Livermore et al (2023) provide more detail on the construction of the survey, including the methods used to recruit participants and calculate the survey weights.