2026-2027 Webcast Lecture Series
Your Attention, Please! Assessing Careless Responding in Survey Measures and Ability Tests
Dr. Nathan A. Bowling
Friday, September 25 | 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST
Abstract
Many research participants display too little effort when completing psychological assessments, a problem known as “careless responding” (Meade, & Craig, 2012). These participants respond to assessments despite having ignored the assessment instructions, item stems, or response options. Careless responding, unfortunately, represents a serious threat to the validity of self-report questionnaires and ability tests, two categories of assessments that are widely used by organizational researchers. In the current presentation, I will discuss three effective measures of careless responding: (a) infrequency indices, (b) response-time indices, and (c) the inability to recognize item content. These indices are useful for identifying careless participants so they can be removed prior to data analysis and for evaluating the effectiveness of efforts to prevent careless responding.
Dr. Nathan Bowling
Biography
Nathan A. Bowling (Ph.D. 2005, Central Michigan University) is a Professor of Psychology in the Industrial and Organizational (I-O) Psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Central Florida. His research interests include (a) occupational stress, (b) counterproductive work behavior, and (c) research participant carelessness. Dr. Bowling has authored over 70 peer-reviewed articles, many of which have appeared in top-tier journals, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Research Methods, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His research was featured in Joireman and Van Lange’s (2015) book How to Publish High-Quality Research, he was included in Aguinis et al.’s (2017) list of the top 2% of most cited authors in I-O psychology textbooks, and since 2020 he has continuously appeared in Stanford University’s annual list of the world’s most cited scientists. Dr. Bowling is a fellow of two professional organizations—the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science. His research is currently funded by the Office of Naval Research. Dr. Bowling is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Stress Management, which is published by the American Psychological Association.