The properties of defective replies to a questionnaire and their effects on analysis of the data

Abstract

It is often said that replies to a questionnaire may include defective responses that are given by respondents who do not read questions, and that their ratio is higher especially in a web survey. In this paper, we make the property of defective responses clear, through analyzing four questionnaire data which were collected under different experimental conditions. The conditions were set so as to be different each other on rates of defective responses.