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The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of socially desirable responding in an item-pair measure of acquiescence from the Big Five Inventory. If both items in an item-pair have desirable content, the likelihood of agreeing with both items is increased, and consequently, the type of responding that would be taken to indicate acquiescence. In Study I, item content desirability was evaluated for each of the 32 items belonging to the item-pairs in two samples of 214 and 68 university students. The item-pair desirability was then correlated with the percentage of respondents who agreed with both items in a separate sample of 895 students. Results showed a substantial correlation between item-pairs' desirability and the percentage of estimated acquiescence, indicating an inଏation of acquiescence when item-pairs have desirable content. The ଏnding was further supported by Study II, in which acquiescence and item diଏculty, assessed with cognitive interviews, were unrelated.

The focus of this study was to evaluate the questions used in the advisory referendum on the proposals for a new Icelandic constitution by the Constitutional Council on October 20, 2012. Cognitive interviews (N=60) were used to evaluate if the questions are understood in a consistent manner. Two survey experiments were conducted where three different versions of the questions were used; a) the original version, b) a version estimating the effect of status quo on responses, and finally c) a version where the prefix “are you opposed” was used instead of the prefix “would you like” used in the original questions. A web survey was conducted using both a sample of university students (n=209) and a social media sample (n=528). The first hypothesis was that people would be more likely to agree with the status quo when the question did not involve change. The second hypothesis was that people would be less likely to agree with a cause by disagreeing with a negatively worded question (“are you opposed”) than agreeing with a positively worded question (“would you like”). The results indicated that a status quo effect on responses was found in two questions in the university student sample and three questions in the social media sample and an effect of using a negatively worded prefix was found in two question in the social media sample but not in the university student sample.

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