{"doi":"10.31234/osf.io/ga6b2","title":"To respond or not to respond: The effect of forced and prefer not to answer options in demographic questionnaires","abstract":"Accurately capturing participant’s true demographic characteristics can be difficult when participants are reluctant to share personal information but researchers want a complete dataset. While forced response requirements can ensure complete responses, they can also lead to respondent discomfort, attrition, or dishonesty. One solution is to allow participants the option of selecting “prefer not to answer” as their response. To examine the effect of forced responding and a “prefer not to answer” option on self-reported demographic information in web-based surveys, participants (initial sample n = 12,915, replication sample n = 3,794) across 22 surveys completed a set of demographic questions (e.g., sex, race, education). They were randomly assigned to one of six conditions, varying the presence of the “prefer not to answer” option and whether they were forced to respond, requested to respond, or had no response requirement. The only statistically significant difference observed in both the initial and replication samples was in the distribution of responses to political ideology questions. Across all comparisons, in both the full sample and the replication sample, we found that when a “prefer not to answer” option was available, fewer participants selected “very liberal” and “liberal” and more participants selected “very conservative.” Outside this result, our findings demonstrate that including a \"prefer not to answer\" option in surveys does not heavily alter the distribution of responses to demographic questions. Researchers, marketers, and policymakers can consider implementing this option to respect participant preferences about disclosing information while collecting valuable data across diverse fields.","journal":"PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)","year":2023,"id":400618,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9626,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1166998,"name":"Rebecca M Mestechkin","orcid":"0009-0002-2976-0364","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1166997,"name":"Randi L. Vogt","orcid":"0000-0003-1709-0471","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1177413,"name":"Daniel Rosica","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":815582,"name":"Patrick R. Heck","orcid":"0000-0003-0819-3890","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1171504,"name":"Pedram Heydari","orcid":"0000-0002-9804-1091","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":815581,"name":"Matt I. Brown","orcid":"0000-0002-4258-1961","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1172148,"name":"Gail Rosenbaum","orcid":"0000-0002-6306-0508","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":397760,"name":"Maheen Shermohammed","orcid":"0000-0002-4780-7325","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":400191,"name":"Michelle N. Meyer","orcid":"0000-0001-5497-8803","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":618152,"name":"Christopher F. Chabris","orcid":"0000-0002-7379-7378","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1177079,"name":"Henri C. Santos","orcid":"0000-0002-6491-7606","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":20,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:20:04.010538Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}