Guidance for Electronic Survey Research

Survey responses from automated entities (bots) can occur on popular online survey platforms. Implementing specific preventive measures such as using ReCAPTCHA, employing conditional logic in questions, or generating unique survey URLs can aid in blocking bot responses. The Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) at the University of Michigan strongly advise researchers to thoroughly examine the features of the online tool being used (such as Qualtrics) and to apply these tactics to safeguard the integrity of research data against spurious submissions. In the event of receiving fraudulent responses, researchers should be able to provide evidence to distinguish these invalid replies from those provided by genuine participants.

For example, please review these guidelines offered by Qualtrics: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-checker/fraud-detection/