Secondary Benefits of Manipulation Checks: Three Illustrations From Behavioral Public Administration

Kenneth Meier¹

, Seung-ho An², Jourdan Davis³, Joohyung Park⁴

¹Public Administration and Policy, American University

²School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona

³University of North Carolina Charlotte

⁴Public Administration and Public Policy, American University

^*Corresponding author :Kenneth Meier, Public Administration and Policy, American University, Washington, D.C., USA, E-mail: kmeier@american.edu

ⓒ Copyright 2023 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Dec 06, 2023; Accepted: Dec 10, 2023

Published Online: Dec 31, 2023

Abstract

Manipulation checks in behavioral public administration are commonly used and reported to determine if the experimental and control group have received different treatments. This paper uses three experiments to argue that manipulation checks for experimental treatments can have secondary benefits that can be used to improve the quality of behavioral work in the field. The three cases address the importance of using more clear terms in experimental manipulations (government v. public), using different on-line platforms to recruit experimental subjects (Mechanical Turk, Prolific, and Data.Spring), and whether larger payments more produce more attentive subjects.

Keywords: manipulation checks; experiments; behavioral public administration; public sector bias; internet recruitment of subjects; incentives