Separating the Shirkers from the Workers? Making Sure Respondents Pay Attention on Self‐Administered Surveys

Adam J. Berinsky, Michele F. Margolis and Michael W. Sances

American Journal of Political Science, 2014, vol. 58, issue 3, 739-753

Abstract: Good survey and experimental research requires subjects to pay attention to questions and treatments, but many subjects do not. In this article, we discuss “Screeners” as a potential solution to this problem. We first demonstrate Screeners’ power to reveal inattentive respondents and reduce noise. We then examine important but understudied questions about Screeners. We show that using a single Screener is not the most effective way to improve data quality. Instead, we recommend using multiple items to measure attention. We also show that Screener passage correlates with politically relevant characteristics, which limits the generalizability of studies that exclude failers. We conclude that attention is best measured using multiple Screener questions and that studies using Screeners can balance the goals of internal and external validity by presenting results conditional on different levels of attention.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12081

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:amposc:v:58:y:2014:i:3:p:739-753

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Political Science from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().