The Effect of Conscientious Responders Scale on the Random Responding Rate in Psychological Questionnaires

Random responding is a form of data distortion in which respondents endorse items without regard for their semantic content. Recently, Marjanovic and colleagues have developed two novel tools to identify random responders. These tools are called the Conscientious Responders Scale (CRS), a 5-item validity scale that can detect a random responder from a conscientious responder by embedding these items randomly in psychological questionnaires, and the Inter-item Standard deviation (ISD), that reflects how widely a responder’s item responses cluster around his/her composite mean score. This research will examine the effects of the presence of the CRS in psychological questionnaires on random responding rates (as measured by the ISD score). I hypothesize that the questionnaire with the CRS scale will have lower rates of random responding as compared to the same questionnaire without an embedded CRS. This would imply that the CRS is not only effective at detecting random responding in questionnaire data but also useful to deter random responding. Therefore, the presence of CRS by itself in a psychological questionnaire is a fundamental factor in reducing the rate of random responding as it will induce a person to become conscientious, thereby providing valid data that can be used in experimental and/or medical settings