Survey Uses May Influence Survey Responses

When validating psychological surveys, researchers tend to concentrate on analyzing item responses instead of the processes that participants use to generate these responses. When screening for invalid responses, researchers have generally focused on participants who manipulate their answers for personal gain or respond carelessly. In this paper, we introduce a new invalid response process, discordant responding, that arises when participants disagree with the use of the survey and discuss similarities and differences between this response style and protective responding. Results show that nearly all participants reflect on the intended uses of an assessment when responding to items and most decline to respond or modify their responses if they are not comfortable with the way the results will be used. Incidentally, we also find that participants may misread survey instructions if they are not interactive. We introduce a short screener to detect invalid responses with dishonest responder identifiers (DRI), providing researchers with more confidence in the validity of their inferences. Finally, we provide recommendations about how researchers may use these findings to design surveys that reduce this response manipulation in the first place.