Answering questions completely, accurately and honestly is not always the top priority for survey respondents. How might researchers motivate respondents to be more conscientious? One possibility is to elicit agreement from respondents to work hard and provide complete and accurate information. In their pioneering work in the 1970s and 80s,…

Social scientists have long agreed that satisficing behavior increases error and reduces the validity of survey data. There have been numerous reviews on detecting satisficing behavior, but preventing this behavior has received less attention. The current narrative review provides empirically supported guidance on preventing satisficing by…

The measurement of political solidarities and related concepts is an important endeavor in numerous scientific disciplines, such as political and social science research. European surveys, such as the Eurobarometer, frequently measure these concepts for people's home country and Europe raising questions with respect to the order of precedence.…

Measuring respondents' attitudes is a crucial task in numerous social science disciplines. A popular way to measure attitudes is to use survey questions with rating scales. However, research has shown that especially the design of rating scales can have a profound impact on respondents' answer behavior. While some scale design aspects, such as…

The present study is the first to examine empirically whether required fields in online surveys impair reliability and response pattern, as participants forced to respond to all items may provide arbitrary answers. Two hundred and thirteen participants completed a survey consisting of six questionnaires testing personal and social issues and…

Selective nonresponse can introduce bias in longitudinal surveys. The present study examines the role of cognitive skills (more specifically, literacy skills), as measured in large-scale assessment surveys, in selective nonresponse in longitudinal surveys. We assume that low-skilled respondents perceive the cognitive assessment as a higher burden…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of socially desirable responding in an item-pair measure of acquiescence from the Big Five Inventory. If both items in an item-pair have desirable content, the likelihood of agreeing with both items is increased, and consequently, the type of responding that would be taken to indicate…

Although careless respondents have wreaked havoc on research for decades, the prevalence and implications of these participants has likely increased due to many new methodological techniques currently in use. Across three studies, we examined the prevalence of careless responding in participants, several means of predicting careless respondents,…

This study explores the acquiescent response style (ARS) among respondents in the Czech Republic. To analyse ARS, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was employed and the response style (RS) was modelled as a latent variable. The RS factor in the CFA model must be validated by its relationship to education and age, i.e. proxies of cognitive…

Web surveys are an established data collection mode that use written language to provide information. The written language is accompanied by visual elements, such as presentation formats and shapes. However, research has shown that visual elements influence response behavior because respondents sometimes use interpretive heuristics to make sense…

Questionnaires routinely measure unipolar and bipolar constructs using rating scales. Such rating scales can offer odd numbers of points, meaning that they have explicit middle alternatives, or they can offer even numbers of points, omitting the middle alternative. By examining four types of questions in six national or regional telephone surveys,…

This study aims to assess whether respondent inattentiveness causes systematic and unsystematic measurement error that influences survey data quality. To determine the impact of (in)attentiveness on the reliability and validity of target measures, we compared respondents from a German online survey (N = 5205) who had passed two attention checks…

The effect of the response scale direction on response behavior is a well-known phenomenon in survey research. While there are several approaches to explaining how such response order effects occur, the literature reports mixed evidence. Furthermore, different question formats seem to vary in their susceptibility to these effects. We therefore…

Participation in web surveys via smartphones increased continuously in recent years. The reasons for this increase are a growing proportion of smartphone owners and an increase in mobile Internet access. However, research has shown that smartphone respondents are frequently distracted and/or multitasking, which might affect completion and response…

This paper aims to explore the response-order effects for rating questions presented in item-by-item and grid formats. It was hypothesized that the primacy effect occurs for both formats of questions, and that this effect is dependent on age, education, and type of device used for responding to questions. Two randomized experiments were conducted…