The Fraudulent Responses in Online Surveys project studies how fraudulent responders, including human participants and automated bots, affect online survey research. Online surveys are widely used because they are efficient and cost-effective, but malicious or low-quality responses can waste research funds, distort findings, and threaten scientific integrity.
Research
This project examines both the costs of fraudulent responses and researchers’ experiences with detecting them. One line of work evaluates how spam responses can affect budgets, data quality, and substantive research conclusions. Another line of work studies how often survey researchers encounter fraudulent responders, when they discover the problem, and how confident they are in preventing or removing fraudulent data.
The project supports stronger data-quality practices for online survey research by documenting the risks of fraudulent responders and evaluating approaches for detecting problematic responses. The work highlights the need for robust screening, transparent data-cleaning procedures, and greater awareness of how survey fraud can affect scientific conclusions.
Schuster, A. M., Agrawal, S., Watson, G. P., & Cotten, S. R. (2026). Online survey researchers' experience with fraudulent responders. Sage Open, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440261424005
Agrawal, S., Watson, G. P., Schuster, A. M., Cotten, S. R., Tidwell, M. L., Baker, N., & Wang, S. (2025). It's more than money: The research costs of spam responses in online survey studies. Research Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470161251357454
Agrawal, S., & Schuster, A. M. (2026, Aug 26). A guide to detecting fraud in online survey data. American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), virtual.
Agrawal, S., Watson, G. P., Schuster, A. M., & Cotten, S. R. (2025, May 13-16). The FAST (Flexible, Adaptive, Systematic, and Transparent) approach to detecting fraudulent responses in online surveys [Poster]. 80th Annual American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Conference, St. Louis, MO.
Schuster, A. M., Agrawal, S., Watson, G. P., & Cotten, S. R. (2024, August 9-13). Researchers' experiences with online survey fraudulent responders [Paper]. 119th American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada.
Agrawal, S., Watson, G. P., Tidwell, M., Wang, S., Schuster, A. M., Baker, N., & Cotten, S. R. (2024, May 15-17). It's More Than Money: The true costs of spam in online survey research [Poster]. 79th Annual American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Conference, Atlanta, GA.
Agrawal, S., Watson, G. P., Schuster, A. M., & Cotten, S. R. (2024, May 11-16). 'Cool, so many responses. Wait, so many responses!' Our first real experience with online survey bots [Paper]. Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, HI.
Schuster, A. M., Agrawal, S., Watson, G. P., & Cotten, S. R. (2024, May 1). Prevalence of fraudulent responders affecting online survey research [Paper]. Clemson Research Symposium 2024, Clemson, SC.
Watson, G. P., Agrawal, S., Schuster, A. M., & Cotten, S. R. (2024, May 1). Strategies to prevent fraudulent responders infiltrating online survey research [Paper]. Clemson Research Symposium 2024, Clemson, SC.
Agrawal, S., Watson, G. P., Wang, S., Baker, N., Tidwell, M., Kalani, N., Schuster, A. M., & Cotten, S. R. (2023, November 8-11). Are you For Real? The research costs of fraudulent responses in online survey studies [Paper]. Work, Stress and Health (WSH) Conference 2023, virtual.
