Racing the Clock: Using Response Time as a Proxy for Attentiveness on Self-Administered Surveys
Name
Racing_the_Clock_Final_Submission.pdf
Size
1.83 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
233bd7a0db5b730a5bb80852d2cc5018
Author(s)
Read, Blair
Wolters, Lukas
Berinsky, Adam J
Date Issued
September 15, 2021
Journal
Political Analysis
Citation
Read, B., Wolters, L., & Berinsky, A. (2021). Racing the Clock: Using Response Time as a Proxy for Attentiveness on Self-Administered Surveys. Political Analysis, 1-20
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Internet-based surveys have expanded public opinion data collection at the expense of monitoring respondent attentiveness, potentially compromising data quality. Researchers now have to evaluate attentiveness ex-post. We propose a new proxy for attentiveness—response-time attentiveness clustering (RTAC)—that uses dimension reduction and an unsupervised clustering algorithm to leverage variation in response time between respondents and across questions. We advance the literature theoretically arguing that the existing dichotomous classification of respondents as fast or attentive is insufficient and neglects slow and inattentive respondents. We validate our theoretical classification and empirical strategy against commonly used proxies for survey attentiveness. In contrast to other methods for capturing attentiveness, RTAC allows researchers to collect attentiveness data unobtrusively without sacrificing space on the survey instrument.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2021.32
