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Who’s cheating on your survey? A detection approach with digital trace data

  • In this note, we provide direct evidence of cheating in online assessments of political knowledge. We combine survey responses with web tracking data of a German and a US online panel to assess whether people turn to external sources for answers. We observe item-level prevalence rates of cheating that range from 0 to 12 percent depending on question type and difficulty, and find that 23 percent of respondents engage in cheating at least once across waves. In the US panel, which employed a commitment pledge, we observe cheating behavior among less than 1 percent of respondents. We find robust respondent- and item-level characteristics associated with cheating. However, item-level instances of cheating are rare events; as such, they are difficult to predict and correct for without tracking data. Even so, our analyses comparing naive and cheating-corrected measures of political knowledge provide evidence that cheating does not substantially distort inferences.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Author(s):Simon MunzertORCiD, Sebastian Ramirez-Ruiz, Pablo Barberá, Andrew M. Guess, JungHwan Yang
Parent Title (English):Political Science Research and Methods
Publication year:2022
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
First Page:1
Last Page:9
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.42
Release Date:2023/02/20
AY 22/23:AY 22/23
Hertie School Research:Data Science Lab
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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