Respondent Fatigue

Respondent fatigue is a well-documented phenomenon that occurs when survey participants become tired of the survey task and the quality of the data they provide begins to deteriorate. It occurs when survey participants' attention and motivation drop toward later sections of a questionnaire. Tired or bored respondents may more often answer “don't know,” engage in “straight-line” responding (i.e. choosing answers down the same column on a page), give more perfunctory answers, or give up answering the questionnaire altogether. Thus, the causes for, and consequences of, respondent fatigue, and possible ways of measuring and controlling for it, should be taken into account when deciding on the length of the questionnaire, question ordering, survey design, and interviewer training.

Participating in a survey requires time and effort; respondents often need to reflect on their behaviors, retrieve or construct opinions on issues, and evaluate candidates, policies, or products. As the time to complete the survey grows longer, the motivation and ability needed by respondents to accurately answer the questions may decline. The level of processing required to answer the questions may also induce fatigue, such that as the questions are more detailed, require recalling past events, comparing or choosing between many different options, motivation may wear thin. Another factor that can generate fatigue is the specific topic of the survey: how interesting or important it is to participants and the type of interaction they have with the interviewer about it. Generally speaking, as (a) the survey is more time consuming, (b) the questions are boring and complicated, (c) more open-ended questions are asked, (d) the interviewer does not motivate adequate answers, and (e) the issue of the survey is mundane or repetitive, respondents' motivation may decrease and fatigue effects may arise.

Fatigue effects may have several consequences for the later items of a questionnaire. Respondents in self-administered surveys may fail to read adequately the lists of response alternatives, skip questions more frequently, or be more likely to engage in satisficing by choosing answers such as “not applicable” or “don't know.” Fatigue may also cause more stereotypical answers, known as straight-line (or response set) responding; these occur when a series of consecutive questions share the same answer choices that appear in the same order, such that an unmotivated person may answer with the same response on all items in the series.

There are several ways in which researchers try to measure and assess fatigue effects. First, the questionnaire may be split and the order of the questions may be randomized or counterbalanced in the different versions. The responses to items presented late on one version can be then compared to responses to the same items when presented earlier, in terms of percentage of nonresponses, don't knows, straight-line responding, and correlations with other variables. Another option to evaluate whether fatigue effects took place is by measuring the consistency of responses to repeated questions appearing early and late in the questionnaire, that is, including an alternative wording for some of the questions and measuring their reliability with the questions appearing earlier.

...