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Racing the Clock: Using Response Time as a Proxy for Attentiveness on Self-Administered Surveys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2021

Blair Read Open the ORCID record for Blair Read [Opens in a new window] ,
Lukas Wolters Open the ORCID record for Lukas Wolters [Opens in a new window]  and
Adam J. Berinsky Open the ORCID record for Adam J. Berinsky [Opens in a new window]
Blair Read*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-mail: bmread@mit.edu
Lukas Wolters
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-mail: bmread@mit.edu
Adam J. Berinsky
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-mail: bmread@mit.edu
*
Corresponding author Blair Read
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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.

Keywords

response timesurvey attentivenessGaussian mixture model
Type
Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 550 - 569
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Jeff Gill

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