FIELD FRAUD FILES — Case #001 – Succesfully Interviewing Nobody

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4,000 interviews across the Niger Delta.
260 of them were conducted with nobody.

A research team was running a corruption-reporting experiment across 106 communities in Nigeria.
The data was flowing in.
The numbers looked fine.

But something nagged at them.
Some surveyors were finishing interviews far faster than anything seen in training.
Too fast to be real conversations.

So the team added something quiet to the survey app.
Audio recordings of the surveyors reading the questions aloud.

Then they listened.

13.83% of the surveys failed the check.
Some recordings were completely silent.
Others captured surveyors chatting with family and friends — while entering fake responses into the tablet.

Interviews with nobody.
Answers from no one.

260 of 1,880 surveys were flagged and thrown out.
And here’s the part worth remembering: once surveyors knew the audio was reviewed nightly, fabrication dropped sharply.

The lesson isn’t just about catching fraud.
It’s that a cheap audio snippet is one of the strongest deterrents against wholesale fabrication ever tested.
People behave differently when the tape is rolling.

If your field data has never been listened to — literally listened to — how sure are you about what’s in it?

Based on: Gomila, Littman, Blair & Paluck, “The Audio Check” (Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2017)
#FieldResearch #DataQuality #SurveyFraud #MEL #AudioAudit

#FieldResearch #DataQuality #SurveyFraud #MEL #AudioAudit