Instructional Manipulation Checks: Detecting Satisficing to Increase Statistical Power

Oppenheimer, Daniel M.; Meyvis, Tom; Davidenko, Nicolas

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Instructional Manipulation Checks: Detecting Satisficing to Increase Statistical Power

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 45, pp. 867-872, 2009

6 Pages Posted: 27 Jul 2007 Last revised: 17 Aug 2009

See all articles by Daniel M. Oppenheimer

Daniel M. Oppenheimer

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Anderson School of Management

Tom Meyvis

New York University (NYU) - Department of Marketing

Participants are not always as diligent in reading and following instructions as experimenters would like them to be. When participants fail to follow instructions, this increases noise and decreases the validity of their data. This paper presents and validates a new tool for detecting participants who are not following instructions – the Instructional manipulation check (IMC). We demonstrate how the inclusion of an IMC can increase statistical power and reliability of a dataset.

Keywords: survey construction, experimental methodology, participant motivation

JEL Classification: C90, C9, C81

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Oppenheimer, Daniel M. and Meyvis, Tom and Davidenko, Nicolas, Instructional Manipulation Checks: Detecting Satisficing to Increase Statistical Power (2009). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 45, pp. 867-872, 2009, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1003424