Measures of Desirability Beliefs and Their Validity as Indicators for Socially Desirable Responding

Abstract

Social desirability (SD)-bias is a serious threat for survey-data quality, and the respondents' desirability beliefs have proven in many studies to predict the incentives for the strength as well as for the direction of this bias. However, the issue of the relative validity of different ways to measure these incentives has hardly received any attention. We introduced three such measures and discussed the respective tradeoffs between their parsimony on the one hand and the implied assumptions which have to be fulfilled on the other. In the empirical part of our paper, we tested with four questionnaire topics whether and how strong these assumptions are violated and thus how much measurement effort is necessary to obtain a sufficiently good indicator for the perceived incentives for SD-bias. These topics were: (a) having prejudice against the elderly, (b) making charitable donations, (c) participating in political elections and (d) being environmentally conscious. We found the most parsimonious one-point measure to be strongly affected by measurement error in the case of all questionnaire topics. Depending on how strong the assumption of monotony was violated, for some topics the medium elaborated simple difference scores were sufficiently valid, but partly only the most elaborated domain-specific difference scores were a valid predictor for the potential strength and direction of incentives for SD-bias.

Natural Resource Use Strategies in a Forest-Adjacent Ugandan Village

“…There is no cost to overestimating the amount of water used on a daily basis. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there may be a very real pressure to give the "normatively-correct" answer (Embree and Whitehead 1993;Stocke and Hunkler 2007), especially in a rural population such as this (Ross and Mirowsky, 1983). In Kibwona, the villagers knew I was studying resource use, and by giving me an affirmative response, they may have believed they were effectively participating in the research.…”

Social Desirability and Environmental Valuation

“…The third factor of the model of response behavior -trait desirability -is an expression of the respondent's expectations about how an answer to a survey question will be judged by some outside audience (Stocké and Hunkler, 2007). Only when the respondent expects different response options to the same question to result in different evaluations as to the appropriateness of such an answer and to result in different levels of social approval, does she have an incentive to bias her answer in a certain direction.…”

“…While talking about such topics, respondents might feel anxious about what kind of evaluation their answer triggers on the part of the interviewer, and consequently how they will appear in the eyes of the latter. In this context, trait desirability -sometimes also termed as social desirability beliefs -is an expression of a respondent's expectations about how a certain answer concerning such traits, opinions, or intentions will be judged by some outside audience (Stocké and Hunkler 2007). Being confronted with a survey question, a respondent can usually choose from different response options.…”

“…An assessment of the desirability of certain options thus equals an assessment of the relevant norm. Several approaches to measure trait desirability can be found in the existing literature on social desirability (Edwards 1957, Stocké andHunkler 2007). The classical approach of Edwards (1957) consists of having a group of judges rate the desirability of certain traits.…”

“…According to this approach, the judges simply indicate if a certain personality characteristic that forms the content of a survey question is desirable or not from their own point of view. Alternatively, Stocké and Hunkler (2007) provide an overview of three widely used measures to assess trait desirability and their theoretical preconditions, namely the one-point measure, the simple difference scores and the domainspecific difference scores. All these methods have respondents rate the desirability of one or more possible points on the range of response options.…”