January
14th,
2019
A paper written with Riccardo Ladini and Cristiano Vezzoni. You can find it here.
In online surveys, the control of respondents is almost absent: for this reason, the use of screener questions or “screeners” has been suggested to evaluate respondent attention. Screeners ask respondents to follow a certain number of instructions described in a text that contains a varying amount of misleading information. Previous work focused on ad-hoc experimental designs composed of a few questions, generally administered to small samples. Using an experiment inserted into an Italian National Election Study survey (N=3,000), we show that short screeners – namely, questions with a reduced amount of misleading information – should be preferred to longer screeners in evaluating the attentiveness of respondents. We also show there is no effect of screener questions in activating respondent attention.
In online surveys, the control of respondents is almost absent: for this reason, the use of screener questions or “screeners” has been suggested to evaluate respondent attention. Screeners ask respondents to follow a certain number of instructions described in a text that contains a varying amount of misleading information. Previous work focused on ad-hoc experimental designs composed of a few questions, generally administered to small samples. Using an experiment inserted into an Italian National Election Study survey (N=3,000), we show that short screeners – namely, questions with a reduced amount of misleading information – should be preferred to longer screeners in evaluating the attentiveness of respondents. We also show there is no effect of screener questions in activating respondent attention.
