Participants that complete online surveys and experiments may be
inattentive, which can hinder researchers’ ability to draw substantive
or causal inferences. Closed-ended manipulation checks are either
correct or incorrect, which allows participants to more easily guess and
reduces the potential variation in attention between respondents.
Alternatively, Dr. Ziegler developed an automatic and standardized
methodology to measure attention that relies on the text that
respondents provide in an open-ended manipulation check. He will also
discuss how to diagnose the impact of inattentive workers on the overall
results, including how to assess the average treatment effect of those
respondents that likely received the treatment.
Bio:
Jeff Ziegler is an Assistant Professor in Political Science and Data
Science at Trinity College Dublin. In his research, he extends
computational and quantitative methods to the social sciences, focusing
on multi-media data (text, audio, images) and experiments. He applies
these techniques to study questions related to political and
psychological behavior.