Our research examined the effects of hands-free cell phone conversations on the encoding of traffic-related information while operating a motor vehicle. We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the onset of a lead vehicle's brake lights while participants drove in a high-fidelity driving simulator. Compared to single-task driving conditions, the amplitude of the P300 component of the ERP was reduced by 50% when participants were conversing on the cell phone and the peak latency of the P300 was also delayed for these cellphone drivers. These psychophysiological data provide support the inattention-blindness hypothesis in which cell phone conversations impair the processing of information necessary for the safe operation of a motor vehicle.

In this article, we evaluate how the analysis of open-ended probes in an online cognitive interview can serve as a metric to identify cases that should be excluded due to disingenuous responses by ineligible respondents. We analyze data collected in 2019 via an online opt-in panel in English and Spanish to pretest a public opinion questionnaire (n = 265 in English and 199 in Spanish). We find that analyzing open-ended probes allowed us to flag cases completed by respondents who demonstrated problematic behaviors (e.g., answering many probes with repetitive textual patterns, by typing random characters, etc.), as well as to identify cases completed by ineligible respondents posing as eligible respondents (i.e., non-Spanish-speakers posing as Spanish-speakers). These findings indicate that data collected for multilingual pretesting research using online opt-in panels likely require additional evaluations of data quality. We find that open-ended probes can help determine which cases should be replaced when conducting pretesting using opt-in panels. We argue that open-ended probes in online cognitive interviews, while more time consuming and expensive to analyze than close-ended questions, serve as a valuable method of verifying response quality and respondent eligibility, particularly for researchers conducting multilingual surveys with online opt-in panels.

No abstract