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,…

Careless responding is a bias in survey responses that disregards the actual item content, constituting a threat to the factor structure, reliability, and validity of psychological measurements. Different approaches have been proposed to detect aberrant responses such as probing questions that directly assess test-taking behavior (e.g., bogus…

The factorial survey is an experimental design in which the researcher constructs varying descriptions of situations or individual persons (vignettes), which will be judged by respondents with regard to a particular aspect. Some researchers present vignettes in text format as short stories, others present the central information of vignettes in a…

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.…

When researching socioscientific topics, particularly on the Internet, readers face multiple texts that they must integrate into a coherent mental model. Previous research in monolingual settings has found that comprehension is biased toward readers' prior beliefs (text-belief consistency effect). Considering that the Internet is multilingual,…

Ensuring comparability of Likert-style items across different countries is a widespread challenge for authors of large-scale international surveys. Using data from the EUROGRADUATE Pilot Survey, this study employs a series of latent class analyses to explore which response patterns emerge from self-assessment of acquired and required skills of…

Several studies have been published on disengaged test respondents, and others have analyzed disengaged survey respondents separately. For many large-scale assessments, students answer questionnaire and test items in succession. This study examines the percentage of students who continuously engage in disengaged responding behaviors across…

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…

Identifying inattentive respondents in self-administered surveys is a challenging goal for survey researchers. Instructed response items (IRIs) provide a measure for inattentiveness in grid questions that is easy to implement. The present article adds to the sparse research on the use and implementation of attention checks by addressing three…

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…

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are applied to reduce response biases in self-report surveys on sensitive research questions (e.g., on socially undesirable characteristics). However, there is evidence that they cannot completely eliminate self-protecting response strategies. To address this problem, there are RRTs specifically designed to…

Much psychological research depends on participants' diligence in filling out materials such as surveys. However, not all participants are motivated to respond attentively, which leads to unintended issues with data quality, known as careless responding. Our question is: how do different modes of data collection--paper/pencil, computer/web-based,…

Log files from computer-based assessment can help better understand respondents' behaviours and cognitive strategies. Analysis of timing information from Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) reveals large differences in the time participants take to answer assessment items, as well as large country differences…

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…