I’m paid biweekly, just not by leprechauns: Evaluating valid-but-incorrect response rates to attention check items

Publication date: Available online 26 July 2019Source: Journal of Research in PersonalityAuthor(s): Paul G. Curran, Kelsey A. HauserAbstractParticipant carelessness is a source of invalidity in psychological data (Huang, Liu, & Bowling, 2015), and many methods have been created to screen for this carelessness (Curran, 2016, Johnson, 2005). These include items that researchers presume thoughtful individuals will answer in a given way (e.g., disagreement with “I am paid biweekly by leprechauns”, Meade & Craig, 2012). This paper reports on two samples in which individuals spoke aloud a series of these questions, and found that a) individuals do occasionally report valid justifications for presumed invalid responses, b) there is relatively high variance in this behavior over different items, and c) items developed for this specific purpose tend to work better than those drawn from other sources or created ad-hoc.

Source: Journal of Research in Personality - July 27, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research