Citation

Aust F, Diedenhofen B, Ullrich S, Musch J. Behav. Res. Methods 2013; 45(2): 527-535.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.3758/s13428-012-0265-2

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Nonserious answering behavior increases noise and reduces experimental power; it is therefore one of the most important threats to the validity of online research. A simple way to address the problem is to ask respondents about the seriousness of their participation and to exclude self-declared nonserious participants from analysis. To validate this approach, a survey was conducted in the week prior to the German 2009 federal election to the Bundestag. Serious participants answered a number of attitudinal and behavioral questions in a more consistent and predictively valid manner than did nonserious participants. We therefore recommend routinely employing seriousness checks in online surveys to improve data validity.

Language: en