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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Identifying Satisficing Respondents in Web Surveys: A Comparison of Different Response Time-Based Approaches
Year 2013
Access date 04.07.2013
Abstract

Satisficing response behavior is a widely recognized hazard in Web surveys because interview supervision is limited in absence of a human interviewer. Therefore, it is important to devise methods which help to identify satisficing. Some authors have recently proposed to use response latencies as a measure of how much cognitive effort respondents devote to answer survey questions (e.g. Callegaro et al. 2004). Following this line of reasoning, exceptionally short response latencies are conceived as an indication of low cognitive effort, i.e. satisficing, while longer response times indicate more careful cognitive processing. Based on these considerations, this paper discusses several approaches to identify satisficing respondents which make use of the interview duration and response latencies. These paradata have the advantage that they can be used as unobtrusive and direct measures of the depth of cognitive processing. Using data from a cross-sectional Web survey with respondents from a non-probability online panel, indicators for response behaviors are constructed which are commonly assumed to result from satisficing, e.g. non-differentiation in matrix questions or frequently choosing the DK option. Then, analyses are performed to examine whether the response time-based approaches are suited to identify satisficing respondents. Lastly, the results are compared in order to assess which of the approaches performs best. The paper concludes with a discussion and critical reflection of using response time-based approaches in the identification of satisficing and points out further research desiderata.

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Year of publication2013
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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