I am looking for a word describing people giving fake answers on a questionnaire. The specific behavior is, for example, choosing 'one' out of a five-points Likert scale for all the questions of the survey. I thought of:
- cheater, but it seems too negative
- liar, but it is not a lie since they did not try to hide the truth
- other negative words who are not very respectful
The sentence in which I would like to use this word:
This procedure excluded 24 [cheaters] from further analysis, since they did not give honest answers.
Any suggestions?
Given that much information is spread in the comments I will try to make a summary it to give more context.
Respondents are first year college students (about 1200) filling in three personality questionnaires in exchange for course credits. The three questionnaires address opposing personality traits. As David K pointed out in chat there are statements contradicting each other, say two query per questionnaire. These statements are supposed to receive a score of '5' if one person scores '1' on the other (theoretically). Moreover, there are a total of 75 queries, each with five response options. Therefore I assumed that a person choosing the same response 75 times is giving meaningless responses. I believe the motive is laziness and they are encouraged by the study credits reward, not money but close enough.
A short detour on how I detected the persons giving meaningless answers. I checked whether they used 75 times the same response.
Best Answer
I work in market research, and we call such respondents straight-liners or speeders.
And
Source for definitions: emi research solutions.
Sample use in a sentence: