Identifying Careless Responses in Survey Data

Identifying Careless Responses in Survey Data (https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028085) was written by Andrew Meade and S. Bartholomew Craig (both NC State University), published in Psychological Methods (APA PsycNET) in 2012.

Content Non-responsivity

Content non-responsivity is "responding without regard to item content". It isn't a new problem, but it is a problem without a solution.

One method of catching such errors is utilizing bogus responses--if a respondent gives a bogus responses, there is little doubt that they are non-responsive. For this to be effective, it should not be possible to straight-line and pass all bogus responses.

Consistency indices are also an option, but bake in assumptions about what non-responsive data looks like. It may not be logical for a respondent to give directly opposite responses (i.e., "antonyms") to similar prompts--but is it realistic?


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