Response behavior in questionnaires: The role of self-regulation.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anja Göritz
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 268749986

Questionnaires are among the most widespread data collection methods in psychology, the social sciences and other disciplines. Questionnaires are cost effective and, in the case of online questionnaires circumvent interviewer effects. Consequently, insights into how to predict, control, and increase questionnaires' validity is beneficial to a large number of scientific and economic endeavors. We propose that considering the concept of self-regulation can contribute to the quality of questionnaires by increasing our understanding of response behavior as well as knowledge of interventions that aim at remedying harmful self-regulation effects in questionnaires. Self-regulation is a fundamental control mechanism that taps many domains such as attention regulation, persistence, decision making, emotion regulation, and behavioral inhibition. Our research harnesses the fact that prior self-regulation effort reduces the effectiveness of subsequent self-regulation (ego depletion). Ego depletion enables us to manipulate state self-regulation capacity and allows for crisp experimental designs to illuminate the effects of self-regulation. Our research is unique in that it applies ego depletion to methodological questions. In detail, we aim to examine five areas: (1) Identifying questionnaire elements that require increased self-regulation. Such elements both cause and are influenced by reduced self-regulation capacity. (2) Using self-regulation to predict satisficing, that is, a reduction of the invested effort while answering a questionnaire. (3) Shedding light onto the intricate link between self-regulation and socially desirable responding. (4) Predicting a new pattern in response behavior: Drawing on the process model of self-control (Inzlicht, Schmeichel and MCrae, 2014), we examine whether ego depletion shifts response behavior towards gratification. (5) Developing and evaluating interventions to mitigate undesired effects of ego depletion on response behavior. To address these topics, we conduct a minimum of 22 web-based experiments and one representative correlational study, each using a heterogeneous sample with a size that allows for precise effect size estimation. In summary, the project will increase the understanding of response processes in questionnaires. It will reveal self-regulation trade-offs in questionnaires, give clear recommendations for designing questionnaires, and brings forth interventions to ensure high data quality despite the presence of effortful questionnaire elements. As such, our research is highly relevant for all areas that use questionnaires. Finally, our findings have implications for interactive response formats other than questionnaires such as in e-commerce, e-governance, and interface design.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants