Falsification

Interviewer falsification, the act by a survey interviewer of faking an interview or turning in falsified results as if they were the real thing, is a well-known, long-standing, and recurrent problem that has drawn occasional attention in the research literature since the early days of the field's development. It has traditionally been referred to as curbstoning, a term that captures the image of the interviewer, out on field assignment, who settles on the street curbing to fill interview forms with fabricated responses instead of knocking on doors to obtain real interviews.

In recent years, the problem has drawn renewed attention because the U.S. federal government's Office of Research Integrity (ORI) made clear in 2002 that it considers interviewer falsification in any study funded by the U.S. ...