Response bias in Likert-style psychological items – an example from a large-scale travel survey in China

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of ensuring response quality when using item sets with Likert scales in travel surveys. Particularly for capturing psychology, such item sets play an important role in travel behavior research. A challenge with this kind of data is the identification of response bias. An example is straightlining, which describes selecting the same response category for each item. Since there is no universal indicator in the literature to identify unusual or strategic response patterns, we apply various indicators, compare the results and develop a new indicator based on correlations which encounters plausible straightlining.