Introducing the Attest Attention Checker

At Attest, our mission is to give you confidence in your data with innovative and industry-leading data quality. We constantly test and validate the most up-to-date methods with our Data Science team, and implement advanced quality checks at every step of your survey – before, during and after – so you can be assured you’re getting quality responses.

Most recently, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes on our latest quality enhancement – an Attention Checker – which assesses engagement at the end of a survey. This complements our suite of existing attention checking tools that we already use.

Our aim is to ensure respondents take your surveys with intent, focus and attention. With this in mind, our attention checker has been designed to detect and remove respondents who don’t pay full attention to the survey, which is particularly important if your survey is longer.

How it works

We add the attention checker at the end of every English language survey, and show to every respondent. Much like all our other quality features, we save you any of the hard work in cleaning your own data by rejecting any respondent who fails the model.

For example, at the end of a long survey, we might say “For data quality reasons, please select ‘apples’ from the answers below.” If the respondent doesn’t select apples, we can assume they might not be paying attention (or might not be human), and we will remove them from your survey data.

You don’t even need to do anything! We’ll automatically replace them with another respondent for no extra cost, allowing you to concentrate on the key aspects of your survey.

This means you have complete and clean data every time, giving you the confidence you need.

Why do it?

Our Attention Checker is a way to further assess the engagement of respondents in your survey, in addition to our existing fraud and quality checks. This is especially important on longer surveys where engagement can decline over time.

How could this impact survey results?

As with all feature updates, we’ve thoroughly tested Attention Checkers before launching it in the product. From our own intensive investigation of the data, we are confident there will be minimal impact on your overall results.

We don’t foresee surveys taking notably longer to fill once live, but we’ll closely monitor this to make sure your surveys continue to complete as quickly as you’ve come to expect, and that there are no other adverse effects over time.

What other data quality checks are in place?

We want to give you top-quality data every time you use Attest. In fact, we pride ourselves on being market leading with our multi-layered approach to data quality. We’re always looking for ways to enhance our checks, and our attention checker is the latest in a series of such enhancements.

We already check for speed, over-claimers and open text, as well as more simple attention checkers before a respondent starts the survey, such as basic engagement and fraud indicators like duplicated IP addresses/known bad sources.

To find our more about the data quality checks in place, reach out to your CSM, the Research Team, or find out more about our mixed methodology to surveys.