Traditional validation processes for psychological surveys tend to focus on analyzing item responses instead of the cognitive processes that participants use to generate these responses. When screening for invalid responses, researchers typically focus on participants who manipulate their answers for personal gain or respond carelessly. In this paper, we introduce a new invalid response process, discordant responding, that arises when participants disagree with the use of the survey and discuss similarities and differences between this response style and protective responding. Results show that nearly all participants reflect on the intended uses of an assessment when responding to items and may decline to respond or modify their responses if they are not comfortable with the way the results will be used. Incidentally, we also find that participants may misread survey instructions if they are not interactive. We introduce a short screener to detect invalid responses, the discordant response identifiers (DRI), which provides researchers with a simple validity tool to use when validating surveys. Finally, we provide recommendations about how researchers may use these findings to design surveys that reduce this response manipulation in the first place.

Survey Uses May Influence Survey Responses.

Though consent forms include important information, those experienced with behavioral research often observe that participants do not carefully read consent forms. Three studies examined participants' reading of consent forms for in-person experiments. In each study, we inserted the phrase "some researchers wear yellow pants" into sections of the consent form and measured participants' reading of the form by testing their recall of the color yellow. In Study 1, we found that the majority of participants did not read consent forms thoroughly. This suggests that overall, participants sign consent forms that they have not read, confirming what has been observed anecdotally and documented in other research domains. Study 2 examined which sections of consent forms participants read and found that participants were more likely to read the first 2 sections of a consent form (procedure and risks) than later sections (benefits and anonymity and confidentiality). Given that rates of recall of the target phrase were under 70% even when the sentence was inserted into earlier sections of the form, we explored ways to improve participant reading in Study 3. Theorizing that the presence of a researcher may influence participants' retention of the form, we assigned participants to read the form with or without a researcher present. Results indicated that removing the researcher from the room while participants read the consent form decreased recall of the target phrase. Implications of these results and suggestions for future researchers are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Some researchers wear yellow pants, but even fewer participants read consent forms: Exploring and improving consent form reading in human subjects research.

In the present study, we tested to see if participants were attentive to details in the consent form for a psychological experiment before signing it. Our initial hypothesis was that participants might not read attentively, due to perceiving the information to be mundane. Depending on condition, the code word was placed in an early, middle, or late section of the consent form. This experiment allowed us to analyze whether participants read through the consent form, and if they paid more attention to a specific part of the form than others. We asked participants to read through the consent form and sign at the bottom when they were finished. Following their signed consent, we orally gave instructions on how to complete the filler task. At the conclusion of the study, participants were given a prompt to recall the code word. The results of this preregistered study show that, of the 136 participants, only 20 participants correctly recalled the code word. A χ2 test of independence revealed that successfully noticing the code word did not depend on the location on the consent form, χ2(2, N = 136) = 0.67, p = 0.72, φ = 0.07. The results of this study show that students did not differentially respond to different parts of the consent form. Open Data, Open Materials, and Preregistration badges earned for transparent research practices. Data and materials are available at https://osf. io/7wazk/. The preregistration is available at https://aspredicted.org/ xyce3.pdf. https://doi.org/10.24839/2325-7342.JN23.2.141

Participant attentiveness to consent forms.

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Participant attentiveness to consent forms.