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Related Experiment Videos

Reducing "I Don't Know" Responses and Missing Survey Data: Implications for Measurement.

Deanna C Denman1, Austin S Baldwin1, Andrea C Betts2,3,4

  • 1Department of Psychology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA.

Medical Decision Making : an International Journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making
|July 3, 2018
PubMed
Summary

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This summary is machine-generated.

A prompt significantly reduced "I don't know" (DK) responses in health behavior surveys. This methodological strategy improved construct correlations more than analytic approaches, enhancing survey validity.

Area of Science:

  • Health Behavior Research
  • Survey Methodology
  • Psychometrics

Background:

  • "I don't know" (DK) responses are prevalent in health behavior research.
  • Current analytic strategies for managing DK responses may compromise survey validity and interpretation.
  • Standard methods for handling DK responses can obscure true relationships between variables.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To compare a methodological strategy for reducing DK responses against three common analytic approaches.
  • To evaluate the effectiveness of a prompt in minimizing DK responses.
  • To assess the impact of the prompt and analytic treatments on the factor structure and correlational strength of survey measures.

Main Methods:

  • A four-group design was employed to compare a methodological prompt with analytic treatments (excluding DKs, recoding to neutral, recoding to mean).
Keywords:
DK responseshealth behaviormethodological strategysurvey datavalidity

Related Experiment Videos

  • The study examined the frequency of DK responses under prompted versus unprompted conditions.
  • Factorial invariance analyses and correlational strength assessments were conducted across groups.

    • Main Results:

    • The prompt significantly reduced DK response frequency from 55.7% to 19.6%.
    • Factorial invariance analyses indicated equivalent factor loadings across all groups.
    • The prompt and recoding strategies strengthened correlations between constructs, with the prompt yielding the strongest associations.

    Conclusions:

    • A methodological prompt to reduce DK responses is superior to analytic treatments for managing such data.
    • Implementing prompts to minimize DK responses can enhance the validity of health behavior research.
    • This strategy offers a more robust approach to data collection and analysis in health behavior studies.