A Basic Study to Prevent Non-Earnest Responses in Web Surveys by Arranging the Order of Open-ended Questions

Although web surveys are convenient and allow easy collection of a large number of survey responses, there is a significant issue that some people give non-earnest responses such as “nothing in particular” in open-ended questions because they want to cut corners. We aim to realize a questionnaire system that could improve a quality of web surveys to gather better responses from respondents. In this study, we focused on the order of open-ended questions in a survey. Then, we experimented using crowdsourcing to examine the effect of the order of open-ended questions on the non-earnest response rate. As a result of the experiment, we found that there were fewer non-earnest responses when the open-ended questions were presented firstly than when the open-ended questions were presented at last.