Fast participant

⛑ Community Support
1

Hi all,

I am not sure as to whether I should ask this question here, so let me know if I should ask it somewhere else. I am a bit in doubt as to whether I should (partially) reward a participant. The participant has correctly answered all attention checks and there has been a technical issue with my study. However, the participant’s completion time has been below 1%, so it is almost at 3 standard deviations. Other participants usually take 20 to 45 minutes or even longer, compared to 8 minutes for this participant. I am not sure, as to what might be appropriate in this situation? The attention checks are fine, but since the completion time is this short I am not sure about the quality of the data.
Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

Ellen

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2

This is the right place :slight_smile:

We typically find that speed is not a very reliable reason for rejection. Participants have a variable reading speed and some use tools (such as browser extensions) to be able to answer surveys quicker while answering accurately (e.g. pre filling common questions like demographics and & hover-over responding to multi-choice questions). As a result, the distribution of valid completion times is often wider than one might assume.

Since they’ve passed the attention checks, they could just have been very fast.

Is there any other reason to suspect that the data they’ve provided might be of bad quality? i.e. gibberish/low-effort responses?