# When Respondents Don't Care Anymore: Identifying the Onset of Careless Responding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Towards Reliable Recommender Systems for Rating Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20802/) (2024)
- [Learning to Pay Attention: Unsupervised Modeling of Attentive and Inattentive Respondents in Survey Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02427/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Questionnaires in the behavioral sciences tend to be lengthy. However, literature suggests that survey length is a contributing factor to careless responding, with longer questionnaires yielding higher probability that participants start responding carelessly. Consequently, in long surveys a large number of participants may engage in careless responding, posing a major threat to internal validity. We propose a novel method for identifying the onset of careless responding (or an absence thereof) that searches for a changepoint in combined measurements of multiple dimensions in which carelessness may manifest, such as inconsistency and invariability. It is highly flexible, based on machine learning, and provides statistical guarantees for controlling the false positive rate. In simulation experiments, the proposed method achieves high accuracy in identifying carelessness onset and discriminates well between attentive and various types of careless responding, even when a large number of careless respondents are present. An empirical application highlights how identifying partial carelessness uncovers novel insights on careless responding behavior. Furthermore, we provide the freely available open source software package "carelessonset" to facilitate adoption by empirical researchers.