Questionnaires are by far the most common tool for measuring noncognitive constructs in psychology and educational sciences. Response bias may pose an additional source of variation between respondents that threatens validity of conclusions drawn from questionnaire data. We present a mixture modeling approach that leverages response time data from…

Forced-choice questionnaires have been proposed to avoid common response biases typically associated with rating scale questionnaires. To overcome ipsativity issues of trait scores obtained from classical scoring approaches of forced-choice items, advanced methods from item response theory (IRT) such as the Thurstonian IRT model have been…

We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results…

This article introduces novel sensitivity-analysis procedures for investigating and reducing the bias that mischievous responders (i.e., youths who provide extreme, and potentially untruthful, responses to multiple questions) often introduce in adolescent disparity estimates based on data from self-administered questionnaires (SAQs). Mischievous…

The severity of bias in respondents' self-reports due to acquiescence response style (ARS) and extreme response style (ERS) depends strongly on how consistent these response styles are over the course of a questionnaire. In the literature, different alternative hypotheses on response style (in)consistency circulate. Therefore, nine alternative…

With the proliferation of computer networks and the increased use of Internet-based applications, many forms of social interactions now take place in an on-line context through "Computer-Mediated Communication" (CMC). Many universities are now reaping the benefits of using CMC applications to collect data on student evaluations of…

The empirical evidence does not support the prevailing conventional wisdom that it is advisable to mix positively and negatively worded items in psychological measures to counteract acquiescence response bias. An experiment, evaluating subjects' ability to respond accurately to both positive and reversed items on a questionnaire, analyzed post-hoc…

This research examines further the hypothesis that subjects tend to allot figures to the negative poles of constructs approximately 38 percent of the time. Sixty Canadian undergraduates judged 20 nonsense words as if these were the names of persons on 20 bipolar constructs. Results clearly supported the hypothesis. (Author)

The non-response bias analysis of data from a stratified nationwide probability sample of high school seniors produced evidence in support of the hypothesis that nonrespondents tend to be of lower "educational level" than respondents. A partial-response bias analysis of the same data indicated that there were similarities between the biases of…