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Web Survey Bibliography

Title The Persistence of Attentiveness in Web Surveys: A Panel Study
Year 2012
Access date 30.06.2012
Abstract

Survey researchers have long known that respondents often fail to pay close attention to surveys. This tendency is an especially significant concern for internet-based surveys because there is no interviewer present to monitor the quality of answers to survey questions. Recently, psychologists (Oppenheimer et al., 2009) have proposed using the Instructional Manipulation Check (IMC) as one way to measure attentiveness during surveys. In our AAPOR presentation last year we compared the IMC with traditional attentiveness measures in their relationship with the strength of observed experimental effects. Several months after the presentation, we re-interviewed respondents from this survey, measured their attentiveness again using both types of measures, and asked them to read a new randomized news story followed by several questions about the story. In this paper, we use the panel data to examine three questions: (1) How likely were inattentive individuals in the first wave to remain inattentive in the second wave? (2) How well were respondents in the second wave able to remember details from the first survey? (3) How should we treat responses from those who are persistently inattentive versus those who are periodically inattentive?

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Year of publication2012
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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