Controlling for Response Biases in Self-Report Scales: Forced-Choice vs. Psychometric Modeling of Likert Items

Abstract

One important problem in the measurement of non-cognitive characteristics such as personality traits and attitudes is that it has traditionally been made through Likert scales, which are susceptible to response biases such as social desirability (SDR) and acquiescent (ACQ) responding. Given the variability of these response styles in the population, ignoring their possible effects on the scores may compromise the fairness and the validity of the assessments. Also, response-style-induced errors of measurement can affect the reliability estimates and overestimate convergent validity by correlating higher with other Likert-scale-based measures. Conversely, it can attenuate the predictive power over non-Likert-based indicators, given that the scores contain more errors. This study compares the validity of the Big Five personality scores obtained: (1) ignoring the SDR and ACQ in graded-scale items (GSQ), (2) accounting for SDR and ACQ with a compensatory IRT model, and (3) using forced-choice blocks with a multi-unidimensional pairwise preference model (MUPP) variant for dominance items. The overall results suggest that ignoring SDR and ACQ offered the worst validity evidence, with a higher correlation between personality and SDR scores. The two remaining strategies have their own advantages and disadvantages. The results from the empirical reliability and the convergent validity analysis indicate that when modeling social desirability with graded-scale items, the SDR factor apparently captures part of the variance of the Agreeableness factor. On the other hand, the correlation between the corrected GSQ-based Openness to Experience scores, and the University Access Examination grades was higher than the one with the uncorrected GSQ-based scores, and considerably higher than that using the estimates from the forced-choice data. Conversely, the criterion-related validity of the Forced Choice Questionnaire (FCQ) scores was similar to the results found in meta-analytic studies, correlating higher with Conscientiousness. Nonetheless, the FCQ-scores had considerably lower reliabilities and would demand administering more blocks. Finally, the results are discussed, and some notes are provided for the treatment of SDR and ACQ in future studies.

Teachers’ Engagement in and Coping with Emergency Remote Instruction During COVID-19-Induced School Closures: A Multinational Contextual Perspective

“…To create each scale, after exploratory factor analysis all negatively formulated items were reversed in order for higher scores to indicate higher levels of engagement and coping. Reverse-worded items were used in this context in order to eliminate socially desirable answers and consequently avoid the response-set bias (Kreitchmann et al, 2019;Suarez-Alvarez et al, 2018;van Sonderen, Sanderman, & Coyne, 2013).…”

Evaluation of the Risk of Anxiety and/or Depression during Confinement Due to COVID-19 in Central Spain

“…Based on these issues, we propose to obtain a representative sample of the national population in the future. In addition, the use of a Likert scale questionnaire may generate response biases such as social desirability and acquiescence response [38,39], validation data can help quantify or mitigate this issue [40,41].…”

High Academic Self-Efficacy and Dispositional Empathy in Future Teachers

“…Likewise, the analyzes were carried out through the administration of self-reports, so it may carry with it a bias of acquiescence and social desirability [77]. That is why future studies should assess or increase the study findings from a multi-method evaluation, with semi-structured interviews.…”