Dear AOM Friends,
Survey research (including online data collection with Mturk and Prolific) is a cornerstone of management and social science research. But careless participants compromise research validity. Estimates show that careless respondents range from 3.5% to a high of 50%!!
Our Organizational Research Methods article introduces "Lazy Respondents" (Laz.R)-a free Shiny R app designed to detect and mitigate careless responding, ensuring data integrity. Laz.R is available at https://hrmmannheim.shinyapps.io/ShinyCR_App/ and computes the following indices:
✅ Laz.R: Laz.R index for each case
✅ Longstr.: Longstring index based on longstring function from the careless package (Yentes & Wilhelm, 2023)
✅ MD: Mahalanobis distance based on the mahad function of the careless package
✅ IRV: Intra-individual response variability function from the careless package
✅ PSyn40/50/60: Psychometric synonym score, based on psychsyn function from the careless package with critical value set to r = .40/.50/.60 (the number of item pairs that exceed the critical value is shown on the CR cutoffs tab; column remains empty if no item pairs identified)
✅ PAnt40/50/60: Psychometric antonym score, based on psychant function from the careless package with critical value set to r = -.40/-.50/-.60 (the number of item pairs that exceed the critical value is shown on the CR cutoffs tab; column remains empty if no item pairs identified)
✅ Conc.answers: String with all answers of an individual combined. The data are the same that are shown on the right for all selected variables, but the concatenated view alleviates pattern recognition.
You can get the open-access article at Biemann, T., Koch-Bayram, I., Meier-Barthold, M., & Aguinis, H. 2025. Using Markov Chains to detect careless responding in survey research. Organizational Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.1177/10944281251334778. Also, you can listen to the AI-generated podcast discussing this article at https://youtu.be/gq3NPOaY45A
I hope this helps, and I look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen!
All the best,
--Herman.
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Herman Aguinis, Ph.D.
Avram Tucker Distinguished Scholar & Professor of Management
The George Washington University School of Business
Washington, DC
https://hermanaguinis.com/------------------------------