The Item Count Technique as a Method of Indirect Questioning: A Review of Its Development and a Case Study Application

Droitcour, Judith; Caspar, Rachel; Hubbard, Michael L.; Parsley, Teresa L.; Visscher, Wendy; Ezzati, Trena

doi:10.1002/9781118150382.ch11

Cited by 110 publications

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“…10 Raghavarao and Federer (1979); see Droitcour et al (1991) for a summary n/a Privacy protection not necessarily guaranteed…”

Section: Empirical Applications To Assess Tax Evasionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Under the item count technique (also referred to as the unmatched count technique, the unmatched block design, or block total response) introduced by Raghavarao and Federer (1979) and described by Droitcour et al (1991), the sample is split into two groups. Both groups are presented a list of several types of behavior and are asked to state how many of them apply to them.…”

Section: Item Count Techniquementioning

confidence: 99%

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Re-Assessing the Merits of Measuring Tax Evasions through Surveys: Evidence from Serbian Firms

2013

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Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW. Non-Technical SummaryWhile there is no doubt that tax evasion is widespread in developing countries, exact measures of its extent are difficult to obtain because, by definition, tax evasion is hidden. However, such estimates are often critical from a policy perspective, for instance to assess the pay-offs of costly countervailing measures. One obvious and potentially timely source of information are taxpayer surveys. However, data on self-reported tax evasion obtained through surveys are typically not reliable. The reason is that survey respondents can be expected to answer questions about tax evasion (or other sensitive topics) not truthfully out of fear of the negative consequences that this may entail if their answers are revealed.To overcome this inherent problem of surveys, sophisticated questioning methods have been developed which protect the privacy of the individual responses by 'bundling' sensitive and non-sensitive questions. In other words, these methods do not allow the interviewer to identify whether, and to what extent, a particular respondent shows the behavior in question. This is likely to provide incentives to the respondent to answer truthfully even if the question is sensitive. At the same time, these questioning methods still allow estimating the prevalence of the sensitive behavior across the whole sample of respondents. These methods have been mostly applied by researchers in sociology and psychology to study topics such as drug use and sexual behavior.The objective of this paper is to evaluate whether a novel questioning method of this type referred to as the crosswise model allows obtaining more reliable estimates about tax evasion through business surveys. The main advantage of the crosswise model is that, compared to similar methods, respondents are not able to resort to an obvious self-protective strategy other than refusal to answer. We compare this method to the conventional approach taken in other business surveys such as the World Bank Enterprise Surveys using data from a rich firm survey in Serbia carried out in November and December 2012. Contrary to most other surveys that examine tax evasion, we also differentiate between two types of tax evasion, namely underreporting of sales and of wages (envelope wages).We randomly split our sample into two subsamples which are almost identical in terms of their industry-size-region distribution. For both subsamples, we estimate the extent of sales and wage underreporting, in one case usi...

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“…10 Raghavarao and Federer (1979); see Droitcour et al (1991) for a summary n/a Privacy protection not necessarily guaranteed…”

Section: Empirical Applications To Assess Tax Evasionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Item Count Techniquementioning

confidence: 99%

Re-Assessing the Merits of Measuring Tax Evasions through Surveys: Evidence from Serbian Firms

2013

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“…Applications include self-reports of racial prejudice (Kuklinski, Cobb, and Gilens 1997;Gilens, Sniderman, and Kuklinski 1998), attitudes towards immigration (Janus 2010), drug use (Droitcour et al 1991), employee theft (Wimbush and Dalton 1997), and risky sexual behavior (LaBrie and Earleywine 2000). Although the validity of this method remains to be investigated more rigorously, some have reported promising initial results showing that the item count technique can successfully elicit truthful answers to sensitive questions (e.g., Tsuchiya, Hirai, and Ono 2007;Holbrook and Krosnick 2010;Coutts and Jann 2011).…”

Section: Introduction and Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Multivariate Regression Analysis for the Item Count Technique

Imai

2011

Journal of the American Statistical Association

245

304

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The item count technique is a survey methodology that is designed to elicit respondents' truthful answers to sensitive questions such as racial prejudice and drug use. The method is also known as the list experiment or the unmatched count technique and is an alternative to the commonly used randomized response method. In this article, I propose new nonlinear least squares and maximum likelihood estimators for efficient multivariate regression analysis with the item count technique. The two-step estimation procedure and the Expectation Maximization algorithm are developed to facilitate the computation. Enabling multivariate regression analysis is essential because researchers are typically interested in knowing how the probability of answering the sensitive question affirmatively varies as a function of respondents' characteristics. As an empirical illustration, the proposed methodology is applied to the 1991 National Race and Politics survey where the investigators used the item count technique to measure the degree of racial hatred in the United States. Small-scale simulation studies suggest that the maximum likelihood estimator can be substantially more efficient than alternative estimators. Statistical efficiency is an important concern for the item count technique because indirect questioning means loss of information. The open-source software is made available to implement the proposed methodology.

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“…For example, one can generalize this method to other designs of list experiments such as double list experiments (Droitcour et al 1991;Glynn 2013) or other indirect questioning methods such as endorsement experiments (Bullock, Imai, and Shapiro 2011) and randomized response methods (Warner 1965;Blair, Imai, and Zhou 2014). These and other related research projects are currently being conducted by the authors and other researchers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using the Predicted Responses from List Experiments as Explanatory Variables in Regression Models

Imai

Park

Greene³

2015

Polit. anal.

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Edited by R. Michael AlvarezThe list experiment, also known as the item count technique, is becoming increasingly popular as a survey methodology for eliciting truthful responses to sensitive questions. Recently, multivariate regression techniques have been developed to predict the unobserved response to sensitive questions using respondent characteristics. Nevertheless, no method exists for using this predicted response as an explanatory variable in another regression model. We address this gap by first improving the performance of a naive two-step estimator. Despite its simplicity, this improved two-step estimator can only be applied to linear models and is statistically inefficient. We therefore develop a maximum likelihood estimator that is fully efficient and applicable to a wide range of models. We use a simulation study to evaluate the empirical performance of the proposed methods. We also apply them to the Mexico 2012 Panel Study and examine whether vote-buying is associated with increased turnout and candidate approval. The proposed methods are implemented in open-source software.

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The Item Count Technique as a Method of Indirect Questioning: A Review of Its Development and a Case Study Application

Cited by 110 publications

References 0 publications

Re-Assessing the Merits of Measuring Tax Evasions through Surveys: Evidence from Serbian Firms

Re-Assessing the Merits of Measuring Tax Evasions through Surveys: Evidence from Serbian Firms

Multivariate Regression Analysis for the Item Count Technique

Using the Predicted Responses from List Experiments as Explanatory Variables in Regression Models

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