Predicting response uncertainty in online surveys: A proof of concept

Online questionnaire-based research is growing at a fast pace. Mouse-tracking methods provide a potentially important data source for this research by enabling the capture of respondents' online behaviour while answering questionnaire items. This behaviour can give insight into respondents' perceptual, cognitive and affective processes. The present work focused on the potential use of mouse movements to indicate uncertainty when answering questionnaire items and used machine learning methods as a basis to model these. N=79 participants completed an online questionnaire while mouse data was tracked. Mouse movement features were extracted and selected for model training and testing. Using logistic regression and k-fold cross-validation, the model achieved an estimated performance accuracy of 89%. The findings show that uncertainty is indicated by an increase in the number of horizontal direction inversions and the distance covered by the mouse and by longer interaction times with and a higher number of revisits to questionnaire items that evoked uncertainty. Future work should validate these methods further.