The Number of Choice Tasks and Survey Satisficing in Conjoint Experiments
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Author(s)
Bansak, Kirk
Hainmueller, Jens
Hopkins, Daniel J.
Yamamoto, Teppei
Date Issued
January 2018
Journal
Political Analysis
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Citation
Bansak, Kirk, et al. “The Number of Choice Tasks and Survey Satisficing in Conjoint Experiments.” Political Analysis, vol. 26, no. 01, Jan. 2018, pp. 112–19. © 2018 The Authors
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
In recent years, political and social scientists have made increasing use of conjoint survey designs to study decision-making. Here, we study a consequential question which researchers confront when implementing conjoint designs: How many choice tasks can respondents perform before survey satisficing degrades response quality? To answer the question, we run a set of experiments where respondents are asked to complete as many as 30 conjoint tasks. Experiments conducted through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Survey Sampling International demonstrate the surprising robustness of conjoint designs, as there are detectable but quite limited increases in survey satisficing as the number of tasks increases. Our evidence suggests that in similar study contexts researchers can assign dozens of tasks without substantial declines in response quality. Key Words: conjoint analysis, survey experiments, survey fatigue, response bias
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/PAN.2017.40
