Keywords

careless responding, vigilance, insufficient effort responding

Subject Categories

Human Factors Psychology | Industrial and Organizational Psychology | Psychology

Abstract

Careless responding (CR) has been identified as a threat to the psychometric integrity of cognitive and non-cognitive tests, with much of the current research focusing on the identification and removal of carelessness from dataset. While this research has proved fruitful in improving data quality, there has been a recent push to move towards preventing carelessness as opposed to post-hoc removal, which harms statistical power. However, the most common prevention strategy to prevent carelessness (pre-survey warnings) has shown equivocal effects. Additionally, the literature lacks an agreed upon theory to explain why carelessness occurs. To address these gaps I introduce theory from the cognitive and human factors psychology literatures to (1) propose a potential causal mechanism of carelessness, and (2) propose a novel CR prevention strategy. Specifically, the literature on sustained attention (vigilance, habituation) provide the opportunity to consider the role of ability (i.e., capacity) to remain attentive to surveys for an extended period of time. Additionally, these literatures offer practical interventions to maintain active attention which could be implemented in survey research to reduce CR. Building from the literature on (1) the vigilance decrement and (2) dishabituation, I experimentally test the effect of changing the visual design elements of a survey to mitigate CR. Specifically, participants were assigned to either a control (normal survey design) or experimental condition (randomized item placement). Results did not support using altered item placement to prevent carelessness (measured via response time, infrequency items, and content recognition items).

Completion Date

2026

Semester

Summer

Committee Chair

Bowling, Nathan

Degree

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Psychology

Format

PDF

Document Type

Thesis

Language

English

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