The Data Trust Score is built on DQC’s shared quality infrastructure and allows users to assess respondent trustworthiness and score the data from nought to 100, with higher scores indicating higher levels of trust.

The score is calculated using three primary inputs, with one being ‘technical fraud indicators’, including whether a respondent’s device has been flagged as fraudulent. 

The second input is ‘in-survey behaviour’, including suspicious actions such as illogical survey responses, task speeding or unsatisfactory open-end text responses. 

The final input is ‘survey participation history’, which features frequency, outcomes and timing of participation across the data ecosystem. 

The Data Trust Score is available through the DQC Quality Tool and via API, and it can be viewed alongside device-level metrics, supplier benchmarks and trend reports in the DQC dashboard.  

The score will be available to existing DQC clients this month and will be released more widely later this year.

Bob Fawson, chief executive at Data Quality Co-op, said: “Market research teams are facing a ‘superfakes’ problem. It has become very hard to tell the difference between synthetic and human respondents, and between thoughtful people and disengaged survey takers.

“The Data Trust Score gives the industry a common, transparent way to quantify trust in the data that underpins business decisions and drives hundreds of millions of dollars in investment decisions every year.”