Detecting Data Irregularities in Social Surveys: Some Recent Developments

This presentation explores recent methodological developments in detecting data irregularities in social surveys, focusing on two key areas: interview falsification and inattentive responding. The first study introduces a multivariate approach to analyzing interviewer errors using data from a long-running, cross-national survey and identifies anomalous country-years and interviewers, also highlighting the crucial role of fieldwork institutes in ensuring data quality. The second study evaluates the effectiveness of commitment pledges and commonly-used attention checks, and proposes a novel timestamp-based clustering method to more reliably detect inattentive respondents. Together, these studies underscore the importance of effective detection strategies in maximizing survey data quality.

MaRCS is a seminar series jointly organized by the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), the University of Mannheim School of Social Sciences, and GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.