IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/polals/v27y2019i02p145-162_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Paying Attention to Inattentive Survey Respondents

Author

Listed:
  • Alvarez, R. Michael
  • Atkeson, Lonna Rae
  • Levin, Ines
  • Li, Yimeng

Abstract

Does attentiveness matter in survey responses? Do more attentive survey participants give higher quality responses? Using data from a recent online survey that identified inattentive respondents using instructed-response items, we demonstrate that ignoring attentiveness provides a biased portrait of the distribution of critical political attitudes and behavior. We show that this bias occurs in the context of both typical closed-ended questions and in list experiments. Inattentive respondents are common and are more prevalent among the young and less educated. Those who do not pass the trap questions interact with the survey instrument in distinctive ways: they take less time to respond; are more likely to report nonattitudes; and display lower consistency in their reported choices. Inattentiveness does not occur completely at random and failing to properly account for it may lead to inaccurate estimates of the prevalence of key political attitudes and behaviors, of both sensitive and more prosaic nature.

Suggested Citation

  • Alvarez, R. Michael & Atkeson, Lonna Rae & Levin, Ines & Li, Yimeng, 2019. "Paying Attention to Inattentive Survey Respondents," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 27(2), pages 145-162, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:polals:v:27:y:2019:i:02:p:145-162_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1047198718000578/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Riccardo Vecchio & Gerarda Caso & Luigi Cembalo & Massimiliano Borrello, 2020. "Is respondents? inattention in online surveys a major issue for research?," Economia agro-alimentare, FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 22(1), pages 1-18.
    2. Elgaaied-Gambier, Leila & Bertrandias, Laurent & Bernard, Yohan, 2020. "Cutting the Internet's Environmental Footprint: An Analysis of Consumers' Self-Attribution of Responsibility," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 120-135.
    3. Vecchio, Riccardo & Caso, Gerarda & Cembalo, Luigi & Borrello, Massimiliano, 2020. "Is respondents’ inattention in online surveys a major issue for research?," Economia agro-alimentare / Food Economy, Italian Society of Agri-food Economics/Società Italiana di Economia Agro-Alimentare (SIEA), vol. 22(1), March.
    4. Hwalek, Melanie & Pierce, Kate & Straub, Victoria, 2024. "Designing a questionnaire with retrospective pre-post items: Format matters," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    5. Jimin Pyo & Michael G. Maxfield, 2021. "Cognitive Effects of Inattentive Responding in an MTurk Sample," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 102(4), pages 2020-2039, July.
    6. Siddique, Abu & Islam, Asad & Mozumder, Tanvir Ahmed & Rahman, Tabassum & Shatil, Tanvir, 2022. "Forced Displacement, Mental Health, and Child Development: Evidence from the Rohingya Refugees," SocArXiv b4fc7, Center for Open Science.
    7. Del Ponte, Alessandro & Li, Lianjun & Ang, Lina & Lim, Noah & Seow, Wei Jie, 2024. "Evaluating SoJump.com as a tool for online behavioral research in China," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 41(C).
    8. Arielle S. Keller & Adam R. Pines & Sheila Shanmugan & Valerie J. Sydnor & Zaixu Cui & Maxwell A. Bertolero & Ran Barzilay & Aaron F. Alexander-Bloch & Nora Byington & Andrew Chen & Gregory M. Conan &, 2023. "Personalized functional brain network topography is associated with individual differences in youth cognition," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-14, December.
    9. Victoria Gevorkova & Ivan Sangiorgi & Julia Vogt, 2024. "Cleansing Investor’s Conscience: The Effects of Incidental Guilt on Socially Responsible Investment Decisions," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 193(1), pages 89-114, August.
    10. Sarah Lord Ferguson & Pierre Berthon, 2022. "A renewable resource model of health decision-making: insights to improve health marketing," AMS Review, Springer;Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 12(1), pages 71-84, June.
    11. Eiichiro Watamura & Tomohiro Ioku, 2023. "Wrongful Conviction Rates and Death Penalty Support: Acceptability Hypothesis in Japan," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(3), pages 21582440231, August.
    12. Bansak, Kirk & Paulson, Elisabeth, 2023. "Public Opinion on Fairness and Efficiency for Algorithmic and Human Decision-Makers," OSF Preprints pghmx, Center for Open Science.
    13. Alfredo Manuli & Maria Grazia Maggio & Gianluca La Rosa & Vera Gregoli & Daniele Tripoli & Fausto Famà & Valentina Oddo & Giovanni Pioggia & Rocco Salvatore Calabrò, 2022. "Emotional Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Nursing Students Receiving Distance Learning: An Explorative Study," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(17), pages 1-10, August.
    14. Daniel Y. Park & Hyungsook Kim, 2023. "Determinants of Intentions to Use Digital Mental Healthcare Content among University Students, Faculty, and Staff: Motivation, Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and Parasocial Interaction w," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(1), pages 1-17, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:polals:v:27:y:2019:i:02:p:145-162_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/pan .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.