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Stop With the Questions Already! Does Data Quality Suffer for Scales Positioned Near the End of a Lengthy Questionnaire?

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Abstract

Research questionnaires frequently include dozens—if not hundreds—of self-report items. Lengthy questionnaires, however, are often a necessity. In some cases, they are needed to assess the many variables found in a complex model; in other cases, they are the result of the inclusion of a single lengthy measure. This raises an important question: Do participants provide accurate responses to measures positioned at the end of a lengthy questionnaire? One possibility is that participants experience fatigue during questionnaire completion, leading them to engage in careless responding, and thus compromising the accuracy of their responses. Another possibility is that even the longest research questionnaires are generally too short to evoke participant fatigue. This latter possibility suggests that participants are largely able to maintain their attention while completing most questionnaires. Given the lack of clarity on this issue, we conducted two experiments (Study 1 N = 244; Study 2 N = 461) in which we randomly assigned each participant to complete a block of target scales at either the beginning or the end of a lengthy (> 300-item) questionnaire. Each participant also recruited an informant who provided reports of the participant’s personality, attitudes, and behaviors. These informant data allowed us to examine the effects of the experimental manipulation on the target scales’ convergent and criterion-related validity. The findings of both studies indicated that the target scales performed similarly across the two conditions. Given the ubiquity of lengthy questionnaires, these findings have far-reaching practical implications.

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Notes

  1. Personality inventories often include hundreds of items. Some noteworthy examples include the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992; 240 items), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured Form (Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008; 338 items), and the California Psychological Inventory (Gough & Bradley, 1996; 434 items).

  2. Convergent validity is present when a given measure is strongly related to alternative measures of the same construct (e.g., when a self-reported measure of conscientiousness is strongly related to an informant-reported measure of conscientiousness; see Campbell & Fiske, 1959; Hinkin, 1998). Criterion-related validity, on the other hand, is present when a given predictor measure relates to a criterion measure in the hypothesized manner (e.g., when a self-reported measure of conscientiousness is positively related to informant-reported job performance; see Cronbach & Meehl, 1955; Hinkin, 1998).

  3. Involvement in a romantic relationship, of course, was not inherently required by our research question and the inclusion of this requirement may limit the extent to which Study 2 findings can be generalized to participants who are not involved in a romantic relationship; however, our need to collect dyad data from Prolific made it necessary to impose this requirement. Prolific asks participants of dyad studies to recruit their romantic partners. Closer inspection of our data suggests that most (94%)—but not all—informants were the participants’ romantic partners. The remaining informants were either family members (4%), friends (2%), or coworkers (< 1%) of the participants.

  4. The complete set of five infrequency items is available from the first author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA

    Nathan A. Bowling

  2. VHA National Center for Organizational Development, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Anthony M. Gibson

  3. Department of Management, Culverhouse College of Business, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA

    Justin A. DeSimone

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  1. Nathan A. Bowling
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Bowling, N.A., Gibson, A.M. & DeSimone, J.A. Stop With the Questions Already! Does Data Quality Suffer for Scales Positioned Near the End of a Lengthy Questionnaire?. J Bus Psychol 37, 1099–1116 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-021-09787-8

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