Large Language Models as Virtual Survey Respondents: Evaluating Sociodemographic Response Generation (2509.06337v1)

Abstract: Questionnaire-based surveys are foundational to social science research and public policymaking, yet traditional survey methods remain costly, time-consuming, and often limited in scale. This paper explores a new paradigm: simulating virtual survey respondents using LLMs. We introduce two novel simulation settings, namely Partial Attribute Simulation (PAS) and Full Attribute Simulation (FAS), to systematically evaluate the ability of LLMs to generate accurate and demographically coherent responses. In PAS, the model predicts missing attributes based on partial respondent profiles, whereas FAS involves generating complete synthetic datasets under both zero-context and context-enhanced conditions. We curate a comprehensive benchmark suite, LLM-S^3 (LLM-based Sociodemographic Survey Simulation), that spans 11 real-world public datasets across four sociological domains. Our evaluation of multiple mainstream LLMs (GPT-3.5/4 Turbo, LLaMA 3.0/3.1-8B) reveals consistent trends in prediction performance, highlights failure modes, and demonstrates how context and prompt design impact simulation fidelity. This work establishes a rigorous foundation for LLM-driven survey simulations, offering scalable and cost-effective tools for sociological research and policy evaluation. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/dart-lab-research/LLM-S-Cube-Benchmark