How to Find and Eliminate Cheaters, Liars, and Trolls in Your Survey
Here’s some advice on conducting quantitative research you probably never heard in a college class, and will likely never hear from purveyors of online survey platforms: Never analyze and report on your data until you take a close look at who (or what) fraudsters may be contaminating your data.
Versta Research has just published its spring newsletter, which features an article on How to Find and Eliminate Cheaters, Liars, and Trolls in Your Survey. We talk about why this is so critically important, and estimate the extent of the problem today. Most importantly, we share some emerging best practices to help combat it.
Our recommended best practices including the following:
- Build an elaborate screening path
- Avoid river sample
- Make rule-based cuts
- Build tiers of red flags
- Include an open-ended question
- Review IP addresses
- Build in quality checks
- Look for inconsistencies
- Review time stamps
- Search for patterns
You can read a full description of each best practice (and how to do it) in the full article. All of these techniques have become essential tools for us in developing research insights by culling out the truly good survey respondents from the bad.