Impacts of Implementing an Automatic Advancement Feature in Mobile and Web Surveys

Automatic Versus Manual Forwarding in Web Surveys - A Cognitive Load Perspective on Satisficing Responding

“…Missing data, reliability, and mean scale scores were similar across the groups. Somewhat similar findings were reached by Giroux et al (2019) given that they did not find significant differences in survey duration time, straight-lining, breakoff rates, or item nonresponse (for mobile users) between the two experimental groups, but desktop users without the automatic advancement feature had higher item nonresponse.…”

“…Instead, they found higher rates of returns for both MF and AF groups to experimentally manipulated items and higher rates of changed answers to the MF groups but not the AF groups. Giroux et al (2019) found similar results given that in their study respondents receiving the automatic advancement treatment on average changed about 50% fewer answers across the survey instrument than those who did not receive the automatic advancement design. Cognitive load theory (CLT) provides a theoretical framework addressing individual information processing and learning (Paas and Sweller 2012).…”

“…Auto forwarding has been shown to increase non-differentiation and primacy effect (Hammen 2010) but also decreasing it in the case of particular horizontal scrolling matrix" (HSM) version (de Leeuw et al 2012) leading the authors considering findings as an evidence of deeper processing in the AF version. On the other hand, automatic forwarding has been almost consistently shown to decrease web survey completion times in comparison with manual forwarding in the Hays et al (2010), Rivers (2006) and Selkälä and Couper (2018) studies but not in the Giroux et al (2019) study. When it comes to item level response times Selkälä and Couper (2018) found AF respondents taking on average 0.4 s (p < .001) longer to provide an initial answer to each item.…”