News

Offering incentives to potential respondents has long been a common way to encourage participation in research.

However, this method of participant recruitment also presents unique challenges in the context of the ever-more-connected digital world. An online survey recently run by NCETA offered participants the chance to win one of three $100 gift vouchers, but within days was inundated with nonsense “spam” responses. Out of more than 700 submissions, only 89 could be verified as legitimate responses. The pattern of responding indicated that these responses came from real people, not bots. However, it’s still unclear who these people were and how they discovered the survey.

Anecdotal reports from other research and government agencies indicate that overwhelming numbers of spam responses may be a growing problem in online research.

Has your online research been affected by spam? We want to understand how widespread this problem is, and how people are dealing with it. We would love to hear from you via nceta@flinders.edu.au to share your story.

NCETA has identified a number of ways to potentially discourage malicious responses, including adding a captcha to exclude bots, sending individualised links to participants, and incorporating “attention check” questions in the survey to identify unusual responses. But perhaps the most obvious option is to simply not offer incentives for participation. The need to encourage people to participate in research is well ingrained in many common study designs; whether adequate samples sizes can be maintained without incentives is an open question that remains to be seen.

NCETA will continue to monitor our future recruitment efforts to ensure sufficient numbers of valid responses are being obtained and explore different ways to discourage fraudulent responding. In the meantime, we encourage all researchers to be extra vigilant for spam responses in their own work.