Survey straightliners

[Tom Dietz]

I seem to recall a user generated command that would aid in identifying survey respondents who "straightlined"--answered question in a series in a thoughtless pattern. But I cannot find it. Any advice on how to find such folks in a survey data set using Stata? I also can use SPSS if it's easier to do there.

[Nick Cox]

I guess at a data layour of respondents in observations and questions in variables.

One kind of behaviour is giving the same answer to every question, which boils down to the row minimum and maximum agreeing. That is necessary and sufficient for the row SD to be zero. So various egen functions could be directly useful. Otherwise you might have to make precise what "thoughtless" means. I might start with a plot of row SD versus row mean.