Investigating Response Patterns Across Surveys: Do Respondents Show Consistency in Undesirable Answer Behaviour over Multiple Surveys?

The relation between answer behaviour and measurement error has been studied extensively. Answer behaviour may be considered undesirable, like answering ‘don’t know’ or ‘won’t tell’. It is not clear to what degree undesirable answer behaviour from the same respondents is present across different surveys. In this study, we investigated to what extent respondents show undesirable answer behaviours consistently over multiple surveys. First, we investigated to what extent the answer behaviours occurred in ten large general population surveys of CentERdata and Statistics Netherlands. Second, we explored the respondent variances and respondent-survey interaction variances to obtain an indication for respondent consistency for each answer behaviour. The results showed that respondents only occasionally give ‘don’t know’– and ‘won’t tell’-answers. An indication for respondent consistency was found for fast responding, slow responding, and ‘won’t tell’-answers in particular. We recommend follow-up research to investigate the relation between respondent characteristics and consistent answer behaviour.