The impact of respondent attentiveness on reliability and validity. Issue 2 (4th March 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Silber, Henning; Danner, Daniel; Rammstedt, Beatrice
• Is Part Of: International journal of social research methodology. Volume 22:Issue 2(2019)
• Page Start: 153
• Page End: 164
• Publication Date: 2019-03-04
• Subjects: Attention -- trap question -- data quality -- measurement error -- web survey; Sociology -- Research -- Periodicals; 300.72
• DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2018.1507378
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1364-5579

Abstract

ABSTRACT: 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 with those who had failed. Our results show that inattentiveness induces both random and systematic measurement error, which impacts estimates of the reliability and validity of multi-item scales. In addition, we conducted a sensitivity analysis, which revealed that the impact of inattentiveness on analyses can be substantial.