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Add to the list of ways to corrupt people with surveys - offering incentives to respondents and bonuses to employees - boring people to death with long questionnaires. Actually, you just bore them to the point where they pay less and less attention to the quality of their answers, until finally they're cheating. When respondents first begin the questionnaire, they're trying to give you the most appropriate answer to each question (optimizing). A little ways into the survey and they are engaging in what Krosnick calls weak satisficing: selecting the first choice that appears reasonable and answering "Yes" to be agreeable. Further into the survey and they are strong satisficing: failing to differentiate between ratings and selecting "don't know" rather than giving an opinion. After subjecting them to many pages of a questionnaire you've lost them and their good will; if the questions are required, they are just randomly selecting responses to be done with the damn thing.What can you do about this?
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