Paying Attention to Inattentive Survey Respondents
By R. Michael Alvarez, L. Atkeson, Inés Levin, Yimeng Li. Political Analysis, 2019
105 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Does attentiveness matter in survey responses? Do more attentive survey participants give higher quality responses? Using data from a recent online survey that identified inattentive respondents using instructed-response items, we demonstrate that ignoring attentiveness provides a biased portrait of the distribution of critical political attitudes and behavior. We show that this bias occurs in the context of both typical closed-ended questions and in list experiments. Inattentive respondents are common and are more prevalent among the young and less educated. Those who do not pass the trap questions interact with the survey instrument in distinctive ways: they take less time to respond; are more likely to report nonattitudes; and display lower consistency in their reported choices. Inattentiveness does not occur completely at random and failing to properly account for it may lead to inaccurate estimates of the prevalence of key political attitudes and behaviors, of both sensitive and more prosaic nature.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34a3febf6ec6a8a3315dd18893d234ef944cd3b6
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Citations in the corpus
- When to Worry about Sensitivity Bias: A Social Reference Theory and Evidence from 30 Years of List Experiments (2020, background): “For example, no liars may be violated if subjects are simply inattentive (Alvarez et al. 2019) and no design effects may be violated if control counts depend on the presence or absence of the sensitive item (Flavin and Keane 2009).”