Observational analysis highlights issues with imposter participants in online research, suggesting implications for data integrity and recruitment.
Imposter participants pose a significant challenge to recruiting participants in online research across disciplines. This is a time-consuming challenge for researchers and has implications for data integrity. We encourage researchers to consider these challenges when designing online studies and to include rigorous ways to check a participant is genuine and eligible to participate in their study. We also encourage a broader discussion around online research and the possible implication of this on our profession.
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Hunter et al. (2025) studied this question.
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