“Measuring Attentiveness on Self-Administered Surveys,” Adam Berinsky, MIT

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP

Abstract: Self-administered Internet-based surveys have greatly expanded the ability of scholars to collect observational and experimental data on large samples of respondents. This gain has come at the expense of monitoring respondent attentiveness, potentially compromising data quality. I will discuss different methods to measure particpant attentiveness including attention check questions and survey response time. I will also discuss some ongoing issues of measurement and interpretation of attentiveness scores.

Adam J. Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT. He is a specialist in the fields of political behavior and public. . Berinsky received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1992 and his PhD. from the University of Michigan in 2000. For the last decade, Berinsky has been studying political rumors and misinformation. Berinsky has won several scholarly awards and is the recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. He is also the founding director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab. In 2016, Berinsky was appointed a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow to study how political rumors spread and how they can be effectively debunked.

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The series is sponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.