careless {careless}

careless: A package providing procedures for computing indices of careless responding

Description

Careless or insufficient effort responding in surveys, i.e. responding to items without regard to their content, is a common occurence in surveys. These types of responses constitute significant problems for data quality leading to distortions in data analysis and hypothesis testing, such as spurious correlations. The R package careless provides solutions designed to detect such careless / insufficient effort responses by allowing easy calculation of indices proposed in the literature. It currently supports the calculation of Longstring, Even-Odd Consistency, Psychometric Synonyms/Antonyms, Mahalanobis Distance, and Intra-individual Response Variability (also termed Inter-item Standard Deviation).

Statistical outlier function

• mahad computes Mahalanobis Distance, which gives the distance of a data point relative to the center of a multivariate distribution.

Consistency indices

• evenodd computes the Even-Odd Consistency Index. It divides unidimensional scales using an even-odd split; two scores, one for the even and one for the odd subscale, are then computed as the average response across subscale items. Finally, a within-person correlation is computed based on the two sets of subscale scores for each scale.

• psychsyn computes the Psychometric Synonyms Index, or, alternatively, the Psychometric Antonyms Index. Psychometrical synonyms are item pairs which are correlated highly positively, whereas psychometric antonyms are item pairs which are correlated highly negatively. A within-person correlation is then computed based on these item pairs.

• psychant is a convenience wrapper for psychsyn that computes psychological antonyms.

• psychsyn_critval is a helper designed to set an adequate critical value (i.e. magnitude of correlation) for the psychometric synonyms/antonyms index.

Response pattern functions

• longstring computes the longest (and optionally, average) length of consecutive identical responses given.

• irv computes the Intra-individual Response Variability (IRV), the "standard deviation of responses across a set of consecutive item responses for an individual" (Dunn et al. 2018)

Datasets

• careless_dataset, a simulated dataset with 200 observations and 10 subscales of 5 items each.

• careless_dataset2, a simulated dataset with 1000 observations and 10 subscales of 10 items each.

The sample datasets differ in the types of careless responding simulated.

Author(s)

Richard Yentes [e-mail], Francisco Wilhelm [e-mail]