Different Randomized Response Techniques to Study Social Desirability in Self-Reports (ISRD3, ISRD4)

• In Event: International Self-Report Delinquency (ISRD) Project: New Substantive and Methodological Insights

Abstract

Social desirable responding is one of the major validity threats of self-report delinquency studies. Especially when comparing prevalence rates of delinquent behavior between cultures, differential responding to sensitive questions can become an issue. In surveys of the International Self-Reported Delinquency (ISRD) studies different techniques to assess (and control for) social desirable responding have been used. This presentation will compare direct and indirect responses to questions of offending behavior using two different variants of randomized response techniques--the crosswise model (ISRD3) and the parallel item technique (ISRD4)--to evaluate the feasibility of these techniques to elicit truthful responses and to estimate the degree of socially desirable responding across cultures in large scale studies of self-reported delinquency.

Author

• Dirk Enzmann, University of Hamburg