### Improving Survey Reliability
New research provides guidance on effectively using screener questions to identify inattentive respondents during self-administered surveys—a common problem that introduces noise into datasets.
### Key Findings from Item-Response Theory
Using just four carefully selected screeners—specifically two grid and two multiple choice questions—can successfully pinpoint un attentive participants.
This approach helps reduce noisy responses, making correlations stronger between survey items. As a result, political science researchers can avoid null findings caused by inattentive answering.
### Practical Application
Our results enable the standardization of screener implementation across future surveys—a crucial step for improving data quality and reliability.
| Using Screeners to Measure Respondent Attention on Self-Administered Surveys: Which Items and How Many? was authored by Christopher Warshaw, Adam J. Berinsky, Michele F. Margolis and Michael W. Sances. It was published by Cambridge in PSR&M in 2021. |
