What’s going on? Age, distraction, and multitasking during online survey taking

• Participants in an online survey revealed what other activities they engaged in while taking it.
• Younger people were more likely than older people to multitask.
• The relationship between age, multitasking, and sense of distraction was curvilinear.
• Most multitasking increased feelings of distraction.
• Some activities decreased feelings of distraction when combined with survey-taking.

Nearly 6000 adults from 7 countries participated in an online survey about what other activities they engaged in while taking the survey and how distracted they felt. Younger people were more likely than older ones to engage in electronic and non-electronic multitasking. Engaging in a wider range of tasks was associated with feeling more distracted. However, once the variety of tasks was taken into account, interruptions associated with checking or talking on one’s phone made participants feel less distracted. The relationship between age, multitasking, and feeling distraction was curvilinear, with middle-aged respondents being more affected by multitasking than either younger or older survey takers. The findings suggest that people of all ages are often deliberate multitaskers who choose their distractions intentionally, at least some of the time. This bodes well for researchers seeking to administer online surveys, because it suggests that survey takers will set themselves up with the type and amount of distractions they are comfortable with. The finding that a high degree of electronic multitasking may decrease the perception of distraction should be followed by experiments verifying if this perception corresponds to actual task performance.