SurveyMonkey

PAID FEATURE: Response Quality is available to customers on some paid plans.

Response Quality uses machine learning to scan your survey results and flag poor-quality responses. For example, if a survey-taker fills a comment box with gibberish, or answers option A on every question, we’ll flag the response so you can focus on high-quality survey data.

To view Response Quality status, the survey needs to be in English, have more than 50 responses, and the response status must be complete. Survey responses collected before March 2nd, 2020 can’t be reviewed for quality.

  • Response Quality isn’t available on incomplete responses.
  • Response Quality isn't available if your survey end page redirects to a third party panel.

When you buy responses with SurveyMonkey Audience, response quality is handled differently.

To turn Response Quality on:

  1. Make sure that you’ve opted in to Automatic Insights.
  2. Go to the Analyze Results section of your survey.
  3. In the Insights section of the left sidebar under Response Quality, click the toggle On. It may take a few minutes to scan your survey responses.

If your survey is still collecting responses, we’ll automatically rescan new responses for quality about every 24 hours.

Once your responses are scanned, you can scroll through Individual Responses to find responses flagged as Poor Quality.

  • If you agree that the response is poor-quality and want to remove it from your results, you can click Delete. This is permanent and cannot be undone.
  • If you think that we’ve incorrectly flagged a response, click Remove flag to clear the flag and flag type. This also helps improve flagging accuracy in the future.

Our machine learning models are trained to look for several different types of poor-quality survey responses:

Flag TypeDescription
ProfanityThe survey response includes a curse word.
Straight-liningMultiple questions have been quickly responded to with the same answer option or in a pattern. For example, the survey-taker chose option B for every question.
SpeedingThe survey-taker took significantly less time to complete the survey than other people.
GibberishThe response includes a text response primarily made of nonsensical words, like "asdfjkl".
LengthThe response is significantly shorter than other responses.
Not a Full WordThe response includes a 1-character answer that's not a word.
Copy-Pasted AnswerThe response matches the question text.

When you export a CSV, XLS or SPSS file, your flagged responses will appear in a separate file. Your Response Quality file will show the respondent ID and flag types for responses identified as poor.

You can also use the Response Quality filter to view responses marked as poor quality.

Beta! When buying SurveyMonkey responses via SurveyMonkey Audience, we automatically detect, delete, and replace flagged poor-quality responses with new complete responses.

If you’re a Contribute or Rewards respondent and your complete response is flagged as poor-quality, you aren’t able to collect a reward or earn credits for taking the survey.