Is undesirable answer behaviour consistent?

Abstract

In this study, we investigated to what extent respondent characteristics may be associated with undesirable answer behaviour consistently across surveys. We used respondent data from ten national population surveys of CentERdata and Statistics Netherlands. An adaptation of the robust effect size Cliff’s Delta was used to compare average density distributions on the potentially consistent occurrence of answer behaviour across surveys. The results did not show consistent undesirable answer behaviour. Many characteristics’ categories were associated with a relatively higher occurrence of answer behaviour for some surveys, but a relatively lower occurrence for other surveys. We conclude that the occurrence of answer behaviour may be more dependent on the survey and its items than on respondent characteristics. We recommend follow-up research to investigate the relation between item characteristics and answer behaviour.