When Respondents Don't Care Anymore: Identifying the Onset of Careless Responding

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Welz, Max, Alfons, Andreas
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866914388509720576
author Welz, Max
Alfons, Andreas
author_facet Welz, Max
Alfons, Andreas
contents Questionnaires in the behavioral sciences tend to be lengthy. However, literature suggests that survey length is a contributing factor to careless responding, with longer questionnaires yielding higher probability that participants start responding carelessly. Consequently, in long surveys a large number of participants may engage in careless responding, posing a major threat to internal validity. We propose a novel method for identifying the onset of careless responding (or an absence thereof) that searches for a changepoint in combined measurements of multiple dimensions in which carelessness may manifest, such as inconsistency and invariability. It is highly flexible, based on machine learning, and provides statistical guarantees for controlling the false positive rate. In simulation experiments, the proposed method achieves high accuracy in identifying carelessness onset and discriminates well between attentive and various types of careless responding, even when a large number of careless respondents are present. An empirical application highlights how identifying partial carelessness uncovers novel insights on careless responding behavior. Furthermore, we provide the freely available open source software package "carelessonset" to facilitate adoption by empirical researchers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_07167
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Respondents Don't Care Anymore: Identifying the Onset of Careless Responding
Welz, Max
Alfons, Andreas
Methodology
Applications
Machine Learning
Questionnaires in the behavioral sciences tend to be lengthy. However, literature suggests that survey length is a contributing factor to careless responding, with longer questionnaires yielding higher probability that participants start responding carelessly. Consequently, in long surveys a large number of participants may engage in careless responding, posing a major threat to internal validity. We propose a novel method for identifying the onset of careless responding (or an absence thereof) that searches for a changepoint in combined measurements of multiple dimensions in which carelessness may manifest, such as inconsistency and invariability. It is highly flexible, based on machine learning, and provides statistical guarantees for controlling the false positive rate. In simulation experiments, the proposed method achieves high accuracy in identifying carelessness onset and discriminates well between attentive and various types of careless responding, even when a large number of careless respondents are present. An empirical application highlights how identifying partial carelessness uncovers novel insights on careless responding behavior. Furthermore, we provide the freely available open source software package "carelessonset" to facilitate adoption by empirical researchers.
title When Respondents Don't Care Anymore: Identifying the Onset of Careless Responding
topic Methodology
Applications
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07167