Nuisance or Remedy? The Utility of Stylistic Responding as an Indicator of Data Fabrication in Surveys

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Stylistic responding is usually seen as a nuisance by researchers working with questionnaire data due to its contaminating effects on the measurement of substantiative constructs. We demonstrate that stylistic responding may be useful to improve the data quality in surveys by allowing for an identification of deviant interviewer behavior - data fabrication - in survey fieldwork. Stylistic responding in N = 710 genuine and corresponding falsified interviews was compared. Genuine survey data was collected in paper-assisted personal interviews. Corresponding falsified data were obtained by instructing falsifiers to fabricate data based on person descriptions of genuine survey respondents. Acquiescent and midpoint responding, response range, and self-enhancement emerged as useful predictors of falsification. These indicators might now be used to develop and refine multivariate statistical methods for the ex-post identification of cheating interviewers in survey fieldwork.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)92-99
Number of pages8
JournalMethodology : European journal of research methods for the behavioral and social sciences
Volume10
Issue number3
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 84922465259
ORCID /0000-0003-1106-474X/work/151436704

Keywords

Keywords

  • Cheating, Interviewer falsification, Response bias, Response sets, Response style