Tackling deceptive responding during eligibility via content-knowledge questionnaires

Abstract

Deceptive responding from participants has troubledsocial research for years. This problem becomes particularly conspicuous when the topic under analysisinvolves relatively private issues, such as sexual behavior or drug use, or when there are incentives, monetary or otherwise, to participate. Illustrating thisproblem, an intriguing study surveyed 100 participants who had regularly served as volunteers in clinical trials and found that 25% to 33% had either exaggerated or fabricated symptoms to facilitate their participation and, perhaps more worrisome, 75% had concealed information likely to result in their exclusion from the study. A recent review claims that overall deception rate among healthy volunteers ranges from 3% to 25%. Almost every piece of literature on deceptive responding indicates the need to improve the screening and eligibility techniques to avoid misrepresentation of own?s behavior. Clinical studies on drug use can employ objective verification, yet toxicological measurements can be very expensive and sometimes they are just not feasible. Example of the latter are studies that employ online research