Detecting Respondent Burden in Online Surveys: How Different Sources of Question Difficulty Influence Cursor Movements

Online surveys are a widely used mode of data collection. However, as no interviewer is present, respondents face any difficulties they encounter alone, which may lead to measurement error and biased or (at worst) invalid conclusions. Detecting response difficulty is therefore vital. Previous research has predominantly focused on response times to detect general response difficulty. However, response difficulty may stem from different sources, such as overly complex wording or similarity between response options. So far, the question of whether indicators can discriminate between these sources has not been addressed. The goal of the present study, therefore, was to evaluate whether specific characteristics of participants' cursor movements are related to specific properties of survey questions that increase response difficulty. In a preregistered online experiment, we manipulated the length of the question text, the complexity of the question wording, and the difficulty of the response options orthogonally between questions. We hypothesized that these changes would lead to increased response times, hovers (movement pauses), and y-flips (changes in vertical movement direction), respectively. As expected, each manipulation led to an increase in the corresponding measure, although the other dependent variables were affected as well. However, the strengths of the effects did differ as expected between the mouse-tracking indices: Hovers were more sensitive to complex wording than to question difficulty, while the opposite was true for y-flips. These results indicate that differentiating sources of response difficulty might indeed be feasible using mouse-tracking.