May 19, 2026 · cs.AIJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Yan Wang, Ziyi Guo, Christopher McCarty
Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning & Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience, University of Florida, P.O. Box 115706, Gainesville, FL 32611. · Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning & Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience, University of Florida, 1480 Inner Rd., Gainesville, FL 32611. · College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Bureau of Economic and Business Research, University of Florida, Suite 150, 720 SW 2nd Ave., Gainesville, FL 32611.
Survey research faces mounting structural challenges: declining response rates, sample bias, block-wise missingness among at-risk respondents, and AI-assisted fraudulent completions in online panels. Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as a remedy, yet rigorous evaluations across the full survey workflow remain scarce, particularly in disaster contexts where data quality matters most. We present and evaluate a five-stage framework for LLM integration covering questionnaire design, sample selection, pilot testing, missing-data imputation, and post-collection analysis, using the 2024 Hurricane Milton preparedness survey of Florida residents (n=946) as a shared empirical testbed. We introduce a Protection Motivation Theory (PMT)-constrained co-occurrence knowledge graph and develop seven LLM configurations spanning zero-shot inference, retrieval-augmented baselines, and novel theory-informed variants. Our proposed Anchored Marginal Theory-Informed LLM (A-TLM) outperforms all three classical imputation baselines (IPW/MI, MICE+PMM, missForest) on RMSE under disaster-relevant block-wise MNAR conditions (S4 RMSE 1.439 vs. 1.496 for the next-best), while achieving near-zero signed bias (-0.121) where the random-forest imputer produces the largest absolute bias (-0.631). Organizing retrieval around PMT causal structure and integrating all evidence in a single model call outperforms unstructured retrieval and staged sequential inference (MAE 0.993 vs. 1.097 for standard RAG). We document that near-zero aggregate bias can mask opposing subgroup errors and propose subgroup-stratified bias auditing as a reporting standard. A retrieval-constrained knowledge-graph chatbot demonstrates that hallucination is architecturally manageable through grounded refusal.