The impact of careless responding on employability research

Careless Responding (CR) compromises data quality in psychological and educational contexts. In this study we examine the impact of CR on research involving a key construct in Higher Education: personal employability. Particularly we assess how this impact depends on the strategy used to address CR by comparing four strategies: 1) using the total sample without taking any action, 2) eliminating careless respondents, 3) introducing CR as a control variable, 4) introducing CR as a moderating variable. Using a sample of 360 university graduates, results show that removing careless respondents reduces statistical power and some hypothesized employability effects become non-significant. In contrast, incorporating CR as a moderating variable was highly informative and yielded the best goodness-of-fit. These findings highlight the importance of considering CR behaviours and suggest that introducing CR as a moderator is an effective approach to maintaining data quality, statistical power and representativeness in employability research.