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The Influence of Item Characteristics on Acquiescence among Latino Survey Respondents.

ABSTRACT: Acquiescence is often defined as the systematic selection of agreeable ("strongly agree") or affirmative ("yes") responses to survey items, regardless of item content or directionality. This definition implies that acquiescence is immune to item characteristics; however, the influence of item characteristics on acquiescence remains largely unexplored. We examined the influence of eight item characteristics on acquiescence in a telephone survey of 400 Latinos and non-Latino whites: qualified wording, mental comparisons, negated wording, unfamiliar terms, ambiguous wording, knowledge accessibility, item length, and polysyllabic wording. Negated and ambiguous wording was associated with reduced acquiescence for the full sample, as well as subsamples stratified by ethnicity and sociodemographic characteristics. This effect was strongest among younger, more educated, and non-Latino white respondents. No other item characteristics had a significant influence on respondent acquiescence. Findings from this study suggest that acquiescence may be affected by interactions between respondent and item characteristics.

SUBMITTER: Davis RE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8205425 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Influence of Item Characteristics on Acquiescence among Latino Survey Respondents.

Davis Rachel E RE Lee Sunghee S Johnson Timothy P TP Conrad Frederick F Resnicow Ken K Thrasher James F JF Mesa Anna A Peterson Karen E KE

Field methods 20190919 1

Acquiescence is often defined as the systematic selection of agreeable ("strongly agree") or affirmative ("yes") responses to survey items, regardless of item content or directionality. This definition implies that acquiescence is immune to item characteristics; however, the influence of item characteristics on acquiescence remains largely unexplored. We examined the influence of eight item characteristics on acquiescence in a telephone survey of 400 Latinos and non-Latino whites: qualified word ...[more]

PMID: 34135694

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Project description:Prior to further processing, completed questionnaires must be screened for the presence of careless respondents. Different people will respond to surveys in different ways. Some take the easy path and fill out the survey carelessly. The proportion of careless respondents determines the survey's quality. As a result, identifying careless respondents is critical for the quality of obtained results. This study aims to explore the characteristics of careless respondents in survey data and evaluate the predictive power and interpretability of different types of data and indices of careless responding. The research question focuses on understanding the behavior of careless respondents and determining the effectiveness of various data sources in predicting their responses. Data from a three-month web-based survey on participants' personality traits such as honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience was used in this study. Data for this study was taken from Schroeders et al.. The gradient boosting machine-based prediction model uses data from the answers, time spent for answering, demographic information on the respondents as well as some indices of careless responding from all three types of data. Prediction models were evaluated with tenfold cross-validation repeated a hundred times. Prediction models were compared based on balanced accuracy. Models' explanations were provided with Shapley values. Compared with existing work, data fusion from multiple types of information had no noticeable effect on the performance of the gradient boosting machine model. Variables such as "I would never take a bribe, even if it was a lot", average longstring, and total intra-individual response variability were found to be useful in distinguishing careless respondents. However, variables like "I would be tempted to use counterfeit money if I could get away with it" and intra-individual response variability of the first section of a survey showed limited effectiveness. Additionally, this study indicated that, whereas the psychometric synonym score has an immediate effect and is designed with the goal of identifying careless respondents when combined with other variables, it is not necessarily the optimal choice for fitting a gradient boosting machine model.

Dataset Information

The Influence of Item Characteristics on Acquiescence among Latino Survey Respondents.

Publications

The Influence of Item Characteristics on Acquiescence among Latino Survey Respondents.

Similar Datasets

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