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Analyze the attentive and bypass bias: mock vignette checks in survey experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2023

John V. Kane Open the ORCID record for John V. Kane [Opens in a new window] ,
Yamil R. Velez  and
Jason Barabas
John V. Kane*
Affiliation:
Center for Global Affairs, New York University, New York, USA
Yamil R. Velez
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, USA
Jason Barabas
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Respondent inattentiveness threatens to undermine causal inferences in survey-based experiments. Unfortunately, existing attention checks may induce bias while diagnosing potential problems. As an alternative, we propose “mock vignette checks” (MVCs), which are objective questions that follow short policy-related passages. Importantly, all subjects view the same vignette before the focal experiment, resulting in a common set of pre-treatment attentiveness measures. Thus, interacting MVCs with treatment indicators permits unbiased hypothesis tests despite substantial inattentiveness. In replications of several experiments with national samples, we find that MVC performance is significantly predictive of stronger treatment effects, and slightly outperforms rival measures of attentiveness, without significantly altering treatment effects. Finally, the MVCs tested here are reliable, interchangeable, and largely uncorrelated with political and socio-demographic variables.

Keywords

Attentivenessmanipulation checksmock vignettessurvey experiments
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 293 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XHACSB
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