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Careless responders are respondents who lack the motivation to answer survey questions accurately. Empirical findings can be significantly distorted when some respondents devote insufficient effort to the survey task, and researchers therefore attempt to identify such respondents. Many measures of careless responding have been suggested in the literature, but researchers frequently struggle with the selection and appropriate use of the available methods. This chapter offers a classification of existing measures of careless responding along two dimensions and presents a conceptual discussion of their relative strengths and weaknesses. An empirical study demonstrates how the various measures can be used to identify careless responders and how these measures are related to each other.

This chapter summarizes public perceptions and expert evaluations concerning elected officials' levels of corruption, focusing on comparisons between the United States and 29 European Union “plus” (EU+) countries (28 EU Member States in 2018 plus Switzerland). While surveys of corruption have become more widely available in recent years, there is still a lack of comparable data focusing on specific government institutions, rather than general perceptions of corruption by elected or public officials. Thus, this study takes advantage of four major sources of citizens' perceptions of corruption to develop an average score and ranking for a total of 30 countries: the 2017 Global Corruption Barometer, the 2017 Eurobarometer subtitled “Integration of Immigrants in the European Union and Corruption,” the 2016 International Social Survey Program's (ISSP) Module on the “Role of Government V,” and the Pew Research Center's 2018 “Global Attitudes & Trends Survey.” Three expert assessments of levels of corruption supplement these surveys: the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project's measure of legislative corruption, Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2016, and the World Bank's 2016 Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) assessment of the “Control of Corruption.” Finally, the chapter tests several hypotheses derived from the literature using the various corruption measures as the dependent variable and finds that choosing a measure of corruption based on citizens' perceptions or expert evaluations is substantively important. Thus, one must exercise caution when selecting one type of measure over the other.

The human factor is the most important defense asset against cyberattacks. To ensure that the human factor stays strong, a cybersecurity culture must be established and cultivated in a company to guide the attitudes and behaviors of employees. Many cybersecurity culture frameworks exist; however, their practical application is difficult. This paper aims to demonstrate how an established framework can be applied to determine and improve the cybersecurity culture of a company.

Two surveys were conducted within eight months in the internal IT department of a global software company to analyze the cybersecurity culture and the applied improvement measures. Both surveys comprised the same 23 questions to measure cybersecurity culture according to six dimensions: cybersecurity accountability, cybersecurity commitment, cybersecurity necessity and importance, cybersecurity policy effectiveness, information usage perception and management buy-in.

Results demonstrate that cybersecurity culture maturity can be determined and improved if accurate measures are derived from the results of the survey. The first survey showed potential for improving the dimensions of cybersecurity accountability, cybersecurity commitment and cybersecurity policy effectiveness, while the second survey proved that these dimensions have been improved.

This paper proves that practical application of cybersecurity culture frameworks is possible if they are appropriately tailored to a given organization. In this regard, scientific research and practical application combine to offer real value to researchers and cybersecurity executives.

This brief paper discusses the relevance of conducting surveys that measure individuals’ attitudes for understanding fiscal behaviour. While many surveys assess individuals’ attitudes towards paying taxes (e.g. by asking them to what extent they believe tax evasion is ever justified), it is less clear whether individuals’ responses to such survey questions are indicative of the way they would behave in reality. The paper presents a discussion of the way attitudes have been assessed in tax surveys and assesses existing evidence to support a link between these attitude measures and actual compliance behaviour. The paper suggests several avenues to improve the predictive value of attitude measures, such as increasing the specificity of measures, using evaluation scales or mitigating social desirability biases. A series of recommendations are made for measuring attitudes and interpreting attitude surveys for the use of researchers planning to conduct survey work, as well as for the use of findings from taxpayer surveys in the design of tax policy and administration.

We develop a theoretical model to compare forecast uncertainty estimated from time-series models to those available from survey density forecasts. The sum of the average variance of individual densities and the disagreement is shown to approximate the predictive uncertainty from well-specified time-series models when the variance of the aggregate shocks is relatively small compared to that of the idiosyncratic shocks. Due to grouping error problems and compositional heterogeneity in the panel, individual densities are used to estimate aggregate forecast uncertainty. During periods of regime change and structural break, ARCH estimates tend to diverge from survey measures.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a general review of “student engagement” with a focus on the measurement of student engagement in UK higher education. A wide variation in how the construct is measured has made it difficult for institutional researchers to compare findings across studies. This study seeks to understand more about the measurement of student engagement by examining the reliability and validity of three national student surveys: National Survey of Student Engagement, National Student Survey and UK Engagement Survey.

Using a narrative review of literature, each survey method is examined to identify the strands of student engagement they can be applied, to determine to what extent survey results can be benchmarked across institutions, and to explore their potential use in institutional led research. Kahu’s (2013) four perspectives of engagement are adopted as a framework for analysis as they represent student engagement as a fluid, multifaceted and, at times, abstract construct.

Findings support the notion that a single instrument cannot examine all facets of this complex construct and that student surveys currently collect information on limited and discrete perspectives of engagement. The use of these three surveys provides a depth and breadth of information about student engagement; however, institutions need to maintain an open dialogue about the construct to ensure its validity, and how to measure and understand it.

Student engagement as a construct continues to evolve and change. This paper adds to the call for institutional researchers to continue to engage in debate about the validity of the construct. The need to maintain essential knowledge of the construct and its many facets is necessary, as is the need to incorporate such knowledge into ongoing work to provide accurate, actionable data to guide improvement and enhancement research.

To measure the success of corporate social software (CSS), interviews, surveys, content and usage data analysis have been commonly used in practice. While interviews and surveys are only capable of making perceived use and benefits transparent, usage data analysis reveals many objective facts but does not allow insights into potential user-benefits. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to link both perspectives to advance CSS success measuring.

The research case is References+, a Corporate Social Software developed at Siemens to facilitate worldwide sharing of knowledge, experiences, and best practices since 2005. References+ currently has around 15,000 registered members located in more than 80 countries. This paper evaluates results from a user survey with nearly 1,500 responding employees and links all survey results to the corresponding participant’s data on platform use to generate additional insights.

The paper generates findings on how CSS is used in practice and how it is perceived by employees of a large-scale enterprise. Furthermore, it explores how a combination of subjective and objective evaluation methods can be applied to advance the state-of-the-art in measuring use and benefits. By linking CSS usage data to corresponding survey data, the paper provides results on what type of use of CSS may create what type of benefit.

This study encourages practitioners to take advantage of a variety of instruments for measuring the benefits of CSS. It generates numerous arguments for practitioners on how to make the benefit of CSS more transparent to financial-oriented decision-makers to successfully defend knowledge management projects against shrinking IT budgets.

This paper is one of the first attempts to explore the relationship between “perceived use” and “perceived benefits” measured by surveys and “factual use” measured by CSS usage statistics for knowledge management research. The findings of this paper may empower the role of user surveys in generating additional insights on use and benefits.

Survey research has developed to become the default empirical approach to answering research questions in the field of hospitality (and many other fields of research within the social sciences). This paper aims to reflect on the use of survey research in hospitality and offers recommendations for improvement.

First, known dangers to validity associated with survey research are discussed. Next, a sample of studies recently published in leading hospitality journals is assessed in view of these known dangers. Finally, recommendations are offered for editors, reviewers, readers and authors to mitigate the risk of drawing invalid conclusions based on survey research.

Survey research is very common in hospitality research and is used to investigate a wide range of research questions and constructs under study. The nature of constructs studied, the answer scales used and the nature of the samples point to a substantial risk to the validity of conclusions drawn.

A number of risk mitigation measures are proposed that can help authors minimise the risks to validity arising from known dangers associated with survey research. These same risk mitigation measures can be used by editors and reviewers in the assessment of manuscripts and by readers to evaluate the validity of conclusions drawn in already published work.

The value of this study lies in reflecting from a distance on how the survey research is conducted in the social sciences in general and in hospitality research in specific. The paper reveals that some routine approaches particularly prone to undermining the validity of conclusions may have been adopted and offers a few suggestions how this risk can be mitigated.

The extent and nature of pre‐purchase information seeking behaviour is a topic of some importance in a market economy. A knowledge of it is clearly a fundamental requirement for successful marketing planning. Despite the development of a considerable research literature, our knowledge of such behaviour is still largely incomplete.