unusual combination of demographics that they find amusing (e.g. they are blind, eight feet tall, orphaned, and in a gang) and then giving extreme responses to survey items (e.g. high rates of depression, high rates of drug use). Low-effort response happens when people are not invested in the survey and have little interest in giving thoughtful responses (e.g. choosing the “neutral” option on every question).
The two types of invalid response we introduce to the survey literature are reticent and subversive response. Reticent response is the withholding of truthful responses because of the personally sensitive nature of items. Examples of reticent responders may include suicidal teens who don’t want people to know that they are suicidal or students who don’t want to confess to being addicted to opiates. Subversive response happens when participants speculate about intended uses or interpretations of the survey and give misleading responses that they believe will bring about desirable results. For example, a student who wants more services for people at her school may untruthfully indicate that she needs these services on an anonymous survey. Individual students reported that they might use several of these response styles in a single survey.
Survey lying is common and there are a variety of motivations for doing it – so where do we go from here? Schools, we argue, should work towards earning the institutional trust of students and try to present tangible outputs from survey research. As one of our participants put it, “I would love to take [this survey] if it was like ‘OK, we’re going to look at these results and cater to the students… what do you guys need?’” For their part, academics should clearly explain to participants any beneficial outcomes of survey research and be clear about the way that confidential information will be handled. In our future work on survey lying we will continue to develop methods that researchers can use to identify “hot” items that attract a lot of lying and to adjust their statistical confidence about those items accordingly. We also plan to test some of our hypotheses about the relationship between institutional trust, social marginalization, and telling the truth.
About the Author
Anthony Clairmont is a fourth year graduate student in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research interests include measurement, mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, and the language and culture in schools. He can be contacted at email@example.com.