Quote:
Originally posted by FelixJaeger:
Done and done, I really am baffled at what so many different worded questions coming to the same conclusion is supposed to mean...
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The point of those is to make sure people aren't just choosing at random. Research based on questionnaire-type evidence is fraught with many problems, which have to be controlled for. Some people want to deliberately ruin research, even if they are voluntary participants, so just pick answers at random which are meaningless and destroy real patterns in the data. If you have a number of questions asking the same thing and negatively worded (ie one time you say 'are you easily distractable', another time 'do you find it easy to focus on one task' - in each case a high answer means a different thing - someone answering all 4s would be picked up) you can check later that people have answered in a consistent fashion, and throw out data that has been confounded like this.
That doesn't help people lying for other reasons of course, for example it may be socially desirable to say that you're not distractable at all so regardless of what how distractable you really are, you consistently say you're not on all questions tapping that, but there are other methods to control for that.