Empirical Tryout of a New Statistic for Detecting Temporally Inconsistent Responders

Statistical screening of self-report data is often advised to support the quality of analyzed responses - For example, reduction of insufficient effort responding (IER). One recently introduced index based on Mahalanobis's D for detecting outliers in cross-sectional designs replaces centered scores with difference scores between repeated-measure items: Termed person temporal consistency (D²_ptc). Although the adapted D²_ptc index demonstrated usefulness in simulation datasets, it has not been applied to empirical data. The current study addresses D²_ptc's low uptake by critically appraising its performance across three empirical applications. Independent samples were selected to represent a range of scenarios commonly encountered by organizational researchers. First, in Sample 1, a repeat-measure of future time perspective (FTP) inexperienced working adults (age >40-years; n = 620) indicated that temporal inconsistency was significantly related to respondent age and item reverse-scoring. Second, in repeat-measure of team efficacy aggregations, D²_ptc successfully detected team-level inconsistency across repeat-performance cycles. Thirdly, the usefulness of the D²_ptc was examined in an experimental study dataset of subjective life expectancy indicated significantly more stable responding in experimental conditions compared to controls. The empirical findings support D²_ptc's flexible and useful application to distinct study designs. Discussion centers on current limitations and further extensions that may be of value to psychologists screening self-report data for strengthening response quality and meaningfulness of inferences from repeated-measures self-reports. Taken together, the findings support the usefulness of the newly devised statistic for detecting IER and other extreme response patterns.